Authors: SongHai Zhang, Tao Chen, YiFei Zhang, ShiMin Hu, Ralph Martin

DOI: 10.1007/s11432-009-0035-7

Abstract:

This paper presents a novel algorithm for synthesizing animations of running water, such as waterfalls and rivers, in the style of Chinese paintings, for applications such as cartoon making. All video frames are first registered in a common coordinate system, simultaneously segmenting the water from background and computing optical flow of the water. Taking artists’ advice into account, we produce a painting structure to guide painting of brush strokes. Flow lines are placed in the water following an analysis of variance of optical flow, to cause strokes to be drawn where the water is flowing smoothly, rather than in turbulent areas: this allows a few moving strokes to depict the trends of the water flows. A variety of brush strokes is then drawn using a template determined from real Chinese paintings. The novel contributions of this paper are: a method for painting structure generation for flows in videos, and a method for stroke placement, with the necessary temporal coherence.