Line drawing via saliency map and ETF

Line drawing is a means of superior visual communication which can effectively convey useful information to viewers. Artists usually draw what they see rather than what exists, which means the most attractive object is emphasized while the rest are inhibited. Moreover, artists draw the whole object with coherent lines instead of fractured lines, which also contribute to the outstanding visual effect. From these perspectives, generating line drawings with saliency and coherence remains a great challenge. Existing line drawing generation methods ignore these important properties and cannot generate coherent lines in some cases since they do not take into account how artists draw a picture. To this end, a novel saliency-aware line drawing method was proposed to better grasp the viewer’s attention on an image. First, a saliency enhanced line extraction method combining saliency map and edge tangent flow was proposed to ensure the saliency and coherence of lines, especially in salient but low contrast areas. Then, the salient information was highlighted while irrelevant details were eliminated by inhibiting lines in less salient areas to enhance the saliency of the line drawing. Finally, the transparency of lines was adjusted to further emphasize important information. Various results showed that our method can generate line drawings with better visual saliency and coherence than the state-of-the-art methods.