Illumination-preserving embroidery simulation for non-photorealistic rendering

We present an illumination-preserving embroidery simulation method for Non-photorealistic Rendering (NPR). Our method turns an image into the embroidery style with its illumination preserved by intrinsic decomposition. This illumination-preserving feature makes our method distinctive from the previous papers, eliminating their problem of inconsistent illumination. In our method a two-dimensional stitch model is developed with some most commonly used stitch patterns, and the input image is intrinsically decomposed into a reflectance image and its corresponding shading image. The Chan-Vese active contour is adopted to segment the input image into regions, from which parameters are derived for stitch patterns. Appropriate stitch patterns are applied back onto the base material region-by-region and rendered with the intrinsic shading of the input image. Experimental results show that our method is capable of performing fine embroidery simulations, preserving the illumination of the input image.