Mural2Sketch: A Combined Line Drawing Generation Method for Ancient Mural Painting

Line drawing is a unique drawing technique developed over millennia in China. Since ancient murals have line drawings of beautiful form and vast history, it is incredibly important to digitally curate these pieces. In this paper, we propose a line drawing generation method named Mural2Sketch (MS) for ancient mural paintings. MS first utilizes heuristic routing to detect the outer edge of a stroke, and then high frequency enhancement filtering is used to extract the information inside the stroke. A complete stroke is then generated by collaborative representation. MS is capable of outputting the result in vector form and producing different artistic styles. Experimental results show that our method is simple but effective. This research has the potential to support digital mural copying, mural protection, as well as related cultural research and application.