Video Stippling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for rendering color videos using stippling, a non-photo-realistic art form, which produces compact, resolution-independent, and semantically meaningful stippled videos with improved temporal coherence.

Contribution

The paper presents a new stippling technique for videos that incorporates dynamic point creation and deletion, semantic-aware density computation, and on-the-fly vectorized rendering for high-quality, flicker-free stippled videos.

Findings

Effective stippled video rendering with minimal flickering.

Ability to handle complex motion and fading effects.

Real-time vectorized stippled video playback.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider rendering color videos using a non-photo-realistic art form technique commonly called stippling. Stippling is the art of rendering images using point sets, possibly with various attributes like sizes, elementary shapes, and colors. Producing nice stippling is attractive not only for the sake of image depiction but also because it yields a compact vectorial format for storing the semantic information of media. Moreover, stippling is by construction easily tunable to various device resolutions without suffering from bitmap sampling artifacts when resizing. The underlying core technique for stippling images is to compute a centroidal Voronoi tessellation on a well-designed underlying density. This density relates to the image content, and is used to compute a weighted Voronoi diagram. By considering videos as image sequences and initializing properly the stippling of one image by the result of its predecessor, one avoids undesirable point flickering artifacts and can produce stippled videos that nevertheless still exhibit noticeable artifacts. To overcome this, our method improves over the naive scheme by considering dynamic point creation and deletion according to the current scene semantic complexity, and show how to effectively vectorize video while adjusting for both color and contrast characteristics. Furthermore, we explain how to produce high quality stippled ``videos'' (eg., fully dynamic spatio-temporal point sets) for media containing various fading effects, like quick motions of objects or progressive shot changes. We report on practical performances of our implementation, and present several stippled video results rendered on-the-fly using our viewer that allows both spatio-temporal dynamic rescaling (eg., upscale vectorially frame rate).