Field Coupling-Based Image Filter for Sand Painting Stylization

Sand painting is a very new and popular performance art technique, and it has important meaning for the artistic creation. Computer-aided sand painting is now in the ascendant, whose fully automated mechanism is still an attractive challenge. Image data field, inspired from short-range nuclear force in physics, is introduced into sand painting stylization. With preserving edges and features, a fully automatic image filter pipeline based on image field coupling is proposed, which consists of three main steps, including image data field generating, multiscale field coupling, and additional details optimizing. The visual comparisons indicate that the proposed pipeline and image filter are feasible and effective, and sand painting-like artistic images can be produced by using multiscale field coupling. The qualities of various rendering images are also investigated from the perspective of feature similarity measures. The quantitative and qualitative results suggest that the field coupling-based filter is appropriate for sand painting stylization, and the time cost is satisfied for practice applications. Generally, the proposed method provides a reference for automatic creation of computer-aided sand painting art.