Anisotropic Kuwahara Filtering versus ToonIt
I heard about the new anisotropic Kuwahara filtering non-photorealistic rendering technique of Kyprianidis, Kang, and Döllner, unveiled earlier this month at NPAR 2009, and decided to compare it with Toonamation’s Gouache filter, publicly available in photo and video ToonIt. See Smooth Paint under http://toonamation.com/2008/03/26/pre-release-video-effects/ from March 2008 for a prerelease demo of Gouache using the same algorithm. For this comparison I set Gouache Quality to High, Spread to 2, Presharpen and Postsharpen to 0.0, and turned off Main Blur and Outlines.
Original:
Kyprianidis:
Gouache:
Click on the images above for a pop-up clip of the source video and clips of the respective filters applied to the same content (click on more than one and reposition to compare). The outputs of both filters look equally abstract and temporally coherent, but the Gouache filter from ToonIt produces results that appear more painterly and less smoothed and also retain more of important contrast details, especially around the face. The Kyprianidis algorithm is currently faster, although it is not yet out in publicly usable form. We are working on and plan to release a GPU implementation of Gouache, as well as our other filters, later this year or early next year.
The image and clips for this comparison were derived from the short film fatalité, produced at MIT. For the record, Toonamation’s Gouache doesn’t use structure tensors to generalize the Kuwahara filter.
Technorati Tags: painted look, painted effect, painting filter, painterly look, painterly effect, painterly filter, non-photorealistic rendering, image processing, anisotropic Kuwahara filtering, Toonamation, ToonIt