Extended papers from NPAR 2010: Non-photorealistic, depth-based image editing

Recent works in image editing are opening up new possibilities to manipulate and enhance input images. Within this context, we leverage well-known characteristics of human perception along with a simple depth approximation algorithm to generate non-photorealistic renditions that would be difficult to achieve with existing methods. Once a perceptually plausible depth map is obtained from the input image, we show how simple algorithms yield powerful new depictions of such an image. Additionally, we show how artistic manipulation of depth maps can be used to create novel non-photorealistic versions, for which we provide the user with an intuitive interface. Our real-time implementation on graphics hardware allows the user to efficiently explore artistic possibilities for each image. We show results produced with six different styles proving the versatility of our approach, and validate our assumptions and simplifications by means of a user study.