Artistic rendering in computer graphics

Abstract

Artistic Rendering in Computer Graphics is an advancing area under image processing domain. It is used to generate artistic images from photographs. Artistic Rendering is also called Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR) because it produces images which are more art based and not true to life, possessing no resemblance to photographs which are true to life. NPR finds applications in many areas such as painterly rendering of images, designing games graphics, cartoon animation, oil paintings, and colored pencil drawings. As part of the project, the author designed and developed a software called as “PhotoMagine” which takes an image as input, applies various artistic effects to it and outputs the images produced as a result of adding each of the effects. The software was designed to exhibit an interactive and user friendly Graphical User Interface with important functionalities such as history box to keep track of the algorithms applied by the user over a particular image. The author further contributed to the project by implementing and incorporating important functionalities such undo and redo effects to enable user to be able to undo/redo a particular effect at any time. The amount of time taken by various effects to apply to the input image was also computed as part of the software and displayed on the interface. The algorithms related to artistic rendering were therefore studied by the author and included as part of the software to carry out several experiments. The detailed description of the phases in the software development life cycle, ranging from requirements analysis, designing of the graphical user interface, implementation and testing of algorithms is described as part of the report.