Sketch & Paint: Stroke-by-Stroke Evolution of Visual Artworks
Jeripothula Prudviraj, Vikram Jamwal
TL;DR
This work tackles the problem of reconstructing the stepwise drawing process of complex artworks by inferring a plausible stroke sequence from raster inputs. It introduces an unsupervised, proximity-based pipeline that first converts images to vector strokes using representations such as $Line$, $QBC$, $CBC$, $CA$, and $EA$, then orders strokes with intra-cluster Ward-linkage and inter-cluster Traveling Salesman optimization to form a global $Stroke\_seq$, integrating both sketch and color painting streams. The approach yields a unified sketch-to-paint evolution, demonstrated qualitatively on WikiArt and diverse data, showing robustness to line art, face sketches, paintings, and natural images and enabling potential applications in interactive art systems, completion, and retrieval. This framework provides a foundation for understanding artistic processes and paves the way for practical tools in art education and creation that mirror human drawing progression.
Abstract
Understanding the stroke-based evolution of visual artworks is useful for advancing artwork learning, appreciation, and interactive display. While the stroke sequence of renowned artworks remains largely unknown, formulating this sequence for near-natural image drawing processes can significantly enhance our understanding of artistic techniques. This paper introduces a novel method for approximating artwork stroke evolution through a proximity-based clustering mechanism. We first convert pixel images into vector images via parametric curves and then explore the clustering approach to determine the sequence order of extracted strokes. Our proposed algorithm demonstrates the potential to infer stroke sequences in unknown artworks. We evaluate the performance of our method using WikiArt data and qualitatively demonstrate the plausible stroke sequences. Additionally, we demonstrate the robustness of our approach to handle a wide variety of input image types such as line art, face sketches, paintings, and photographic images. By exploring stroke extraction and sequence construction, we aim to improve our understanding of the intricacies of the art development techniques and the step-by-step reconstruction process behind visual artworks, thereby enriching our understanding of the creative journey from the initial sketch to the final artwork.