Artistic paper-cut of human portraits

Abstract

This paper presents a method to render artistic paper-cut of human portraits. Rendering paper-cut images from photographs can be considered as an inhomogeneous image binarization problem, to which ideal solutions should reproduce vivid image details with sparse cuts. Especially for portrait paper-cut, good artworks should capture impressive facial features. To achieve this goal, our approach integrates bottom-up and top-down cues to better determine the binary values. In the bottom-up phase, facial components are localized on the input photograph, and their draft binary versions are proposed. In the top-down phase, we use pre-collected representative paper-cut templates, with which we synthesize the final paper-cut image by matching them with the bottom-up proposals. Experimental results show that our approach can produce visually satisfactory results.