Sisley the abstract painter

We present an interactive abstract painting system named Sisley. Sisley works upon the psychological principle [Berlyne 1971] that abstract arts are often characterized by their greater perceptual ambiguities than photographs, which tend to invoke moderate mental efforts of the audience for interpretation, accompanied with subtle aesthetic pleasures. Given an input photograph, Sisley decomposes it into a hierarchy/tree of its constituent image components (e.g., regions, objects of different categories) with interactive guidance from the user, then automatically generates corresponding abstract painting images, with increased ambiguities of both the scene and individual objects at desired levels. Sisley consists of three major working parts: (1) an interactive image parser executing the tasks of segmentation, labeling, and hierarchical organization, (2) a painterly rendering engine with abstract operators for transferring the image appearance, and (3) a numerical ambiguity computation a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: NPAR
• Authors: Mingtian Zhao, Song Chun Zhu
• Keywords: NPAR 2010, NPAR) D. Martin, G. Arroyo, M. Luzon