Paint with Stitches: A Random-needle Embroidery Rendering Method

Random-needle Embroidery is a graceful Chinese Embroidery art enrolled in the World Intangible Heritage, which "draws" beautiful images with thousands of free-form threads. In this paper, we explore techniques for automatically translating a reference image into an art image with the style of random-needles. We first define the artistic style of Random-needle Embroidery by introducing the notion of "stitch"---collections of threads arranged in different patterns---as the basic rendering primitive. During runtime, a multi-layer stylization strategy including stitch selection and multi-layer rendering is proposed to construct the mapping between image content and stitches. A rendering image is gradually built up by a series of layers, and various style appearances can be generated by our method. Experimental results show that our method can effectively produces texture-richness rendering images with the style of random-needles.