Interactive clean-up of sketches

Abstract

The process of converting rough sketches to clean line art is a tedious and time-consuming process, regardless of whether the sketch is done digitally, or on a piece of paper and scanned into a computer. Existing software does not provide any tools to speed up the clean-up process, and most software which converts raster images to vector lines does not remove unwanted lines from consideration, which makes the clean-up process necessary. This project addresses the aforementioned problem by modifying the Intelligent Scissors tool for the purpose of sketches. The Intelligent Scissors tool was originally created for the extraction of objects from photographs. It allows the user to define object boundaries efficiently and without much precision, as the tool automatically snaps to object edges. It is feasible to use the Intelligent Scissors tool for creating clean lines in artwork, because of its edge-detection capabilities. Edges occur between the sketch lines and background. Over the course of the project, some modifications were made to the Intelligent Scissors to make it more applicable to sketches. This method proved fairly successful in the clean-up of sketches. It was possible to create smooth curves from complex sketches. This could potentially be useful to artists who need to create many clean drawings from sketches in a short time.