Expressive line drawings of human faces from range images

Abstract

We propose a novel technique to extract features from a range image and use them to produce a 3D pen-and-ink style portrait similar to a traditional artistic drawing. Unlike most previous template-based, component-based or example-based face sketching methods, which work from a frontal photograph as input, our system uses a range image as input. Our method runs in real-time for models of moderate complexity, allowing the pose and drawing style to be modified interactively. Portrait drawing in our system makes use of occluding contours and suggestive contours as the most important shape cues. However, current 3D feature line detection methods require a smooth mesh and cannot be reliably applied directly to noisy range images. We thus present an improved silhouette line detection algorithm. Feature edges related to the significant parts of a face are extracted from the range image, connected, and smoothed, allowing us to construct chains of line paths which can then be rendered as desired. We also incorporate various portrait-drawing principles to provide several simple yet effective nonphotorealistic portrait renderers such as a pen-and-ink shader, a hatch shader and a sketch shader. These are able to generate various life-like impressions in different styles from a user-chosen viewpoint. To obtain satisfactory results, we refine rendered output by smoothing changes in line thickness and opacity. We are careful to provide appropriate visual cues to enhance the viewer’s comprehension of the human face. Our experimental results demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of our approach, and further suggest that our approach can be extended to other 3D geometric objects.