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Closure-aware sketch simplification

Published: 02 November 2015 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to simplify sketch drawings. The core problem is how to group sketchy strokes meaningfully, and this depends on how humans understand the sketches. The existing methods mainly rely on thresholding low-level geometric properties among the strokes, such as proximity, continuity and parallelism. However, it is not uncommon to have strokes with equal geometric properties but different semantics. The lack of semantic analysis will lead to the inability in differentiating the above semantically different scenarios. In this paper, we point out that, due to the gestalt phenomenon of closure, the grouping of strokes is actually highly influenced by the interpretation of regions. On the other hand, the interpretation of regions is also influenced by the interpretation of strokes since regions are formed and depicted by strokes. This is actually a chicken-or-the-egg dilemma and we solve it by an iterative cyclic refinement approach. Once the formed stroke groups are stabilized, we can simplify the sketchy strokes by replacing each stroke group with a smooth curve. We evaluate our method on a wide range of different sketch styles and semantically meaningful simplification results can be obtained in all test cases.

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      cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
      ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 34, Issue 6
      November 2015
      944 pages
      ISSN:0730-0301
      EISSN:1557-7368
      DOI:10.1145/2816795
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 02 November 2015
      Published in TOG Volume 34, Issue 6

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      Author Tags

      1. gestalt analysis
      2. law of closure
      3. sketch simplification

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      • (2024)MARVEL: Raster Gray-level Manga Vectorization via Primitive-wise Deep Reinforcement LearningIEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology10.1109/TCSVT.2023.3309786(1-1)Online publication date: 2024
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