Stroke-guided Image Synthesis for Skeletal Structure Editing

Abstract

Creating variations of an image object is an important task, which usually requires manipulating the skeletal structure of the object. However, most existing methods (such as image deformation) only allow for stretching the skeletal structure of an object: modifying skeletal topology remains a challenge. This paper presents a technique for synthesizing image objects with different skeletal structures while respecting to an input image object. To apply this technique, a user firstly annotates the skeletal structure of the input object by specifying a number of strokes in the input image, and draws corresponding strokes in an output domain to generate new skeletal structures. Then, a number of the example texture pieces are sampled along the strokes in the input image and pasted along the strokes in the output domain with their orientations. The result is obtained by optimizing the texture sampling and seam computation. The proposed method is successfully used to synthesize challenging skeletal structures, such as skeletal branches, and a wide range of image objects with various skeletal structures, to demonstrate its effectiveness.