im2hyperdrawing

project

im2hyperdrawing
by Youngwook Paul Kwon

overview &
motivation

This work is motivated by an Italian artist Marcello Barenghi's videos about hyperrealistic (3D illusion) art on the Internet. Starting from an empty paper, he shows the hyperrealistic drawing process, which ends up with photo-like scenes. You can see them here:
m&m's
Snickers bar

I also captured a few moments from his m&m's video:

Isn't it cool?

My goal is to mimic this process and generate it artificially. It is truly remarkable that humans can reproduce a photo-like scene purely from memory. How about a computer? If a computer is given an input scene, reproducing it precisely is trivially easy — maybe just one line of MATLAB code. But my question is:
"Can I generate such a process (video) that looks like someone drawing from an empty paper and ending with a photo-like scene (which is actually the original input image)?"
How nice would it be if we could generate such a video — for your photo or a commercial film — without hiring experienced (and expensive) artists?

algorithm

- Poisson blending
- Mean-shift segmentation
- Canny edge detection
- (incomplete explanation for now)

results

For the current results, you can see the video HERE!

As input, I used an image of a real can of Coke on paper, as shown below. This is the final state of the generated drawing.

Here is the drawing process generated for the can of Coke. These are some screenshots from the result video.

Next, the input is a bag of Twix. I also tried combining it with a real video for more dramatic effect — it starts drawing on an empty paper, and ends with someone grabbing the Twix in real life. You can see the video HERE!