Image Stylization from Stereo Views of Natural Scenes

As media technologies have developed over time, generating novel methods of creating, presenting and interacting with visual information, artists began experimenting with new concepts and possibilities by producing artworks which moved conventional borders of art expression. New media technologies have introduced new opportunities for artistic creation and have brought the computer created design and artwork to a wide spread instrument of visual communication. These recent trends in artistic production and presentation of visual material consequently stimulated the development of novel techniques in the field of computer graphics. Particularly, the (semi-)automatic creation of output that resembles conventional art forms, such as various styles of drawings or paintings produced by hand, has attracted a lot of attention in the computer graphics community. To generate results with a handcrafted-like appearance, a number of systems use a 3D modeled scene and thus benefit from full control over the scene structure. On the other hand, using images of natural scenes in order to compute their stylized representation is a very challenging task. The process of extracting information that is useful for the subsequent stylization from the real input scene can be quite complex and demanding, mostly because of the presence of noise and other artifacts. In spite of this, natural scenes offer a variety of ready-made shapes, objects and textures, which sets them to a powerful and very attractive alternative to 3D modeled scenes for simulating the traditional and exploring new art forms. The focus of this thesis is the stylization of images from real scenes cap-