AttentionPainter: An Efficient and Adaptive Stroke Predictor for Scene Painting

Stroke-based Rendering (SBR) aims to decompose an input image into a sequence of parameterized strokes, which can be rendered into a painting that resembles the input image. Recently, Neural Painting methods that utilize deep learning and reinforcement learning models to predict the stroke sequences have been developed, but suffer from longer inference time or unstable training. To address these issues, we propose AttentionPainter, an efficient and adaptive model for single-step neural painting. First, we propose a novel scalable stroke predictor, which predicts a large number of stroke parameters within a single forward process, instead of the iterative prediction of previous Reinforcement Learning or auto-regressive methods, which makes AttentionPainter faster than previous neural painting methods. To further increase the training efficiency, we propose a Fast Stroke Stacking algorithm, which brings 13 times acceleration for training. Moreover, we propose Stroke-density Loss, which encourages the model to use small strokes for detailed information, to help improve the reconstruction quality. Finally, we design a Stroke Diffusion Model as an application of AttentionPainter, which conducts the denoising process in the stroke parameter space and facilitates stroke-based inpainting and editing applications helpful for human artists’ design. Extensive experiments show that AttentionPainter outperforms the state-of-the-art neural painting methods.