Animated construction of ink-wash paintings

Chinese ink-wash painting is a unique and fascinating form of art. Revealing the drawing process of an ink-wash artwork is visually intriguing and useful for training of painting skills. Recording the sequences of strokes by camera during the creation of paintings is either laborious or even unavailable especially for some ancient paintings. In this work, we propose an effective solution for estimating an order given a number of 2D strokes extracted from ink-wash painting images (Figure 1). The understanding of art varies with people, so our objective is finding a reasonable solution that is plausible to human eyes, instead of searching for the best drawing sequence. We formulate the ordering of strokes as breadth first search on a graph encoding both the individual features of strokes (e.g., size, shade, position, etc.) and their spatial relationships. Compared with the work of recovering the drawing order of line artworks [Fu et al. 2011], our problem is more difficult since the art form of ink-wash painting is more complicated than line drawing.