Feature-guided Image Stippling

This paper presents an automatic method for producing stipple renderings from photographs, following the style of professional hedcut illustrations. For effective depiction of image features, we introduce a novel dot placement algorithm which adapts stipple dots to the local shapes. The core idea is to guide the dot placement along ‘feature flow’ extracted from the feature lines, resulting in a dot distribution that conforms to feature shapes. The sizes of dots are also adaptively determined from the input image for proper tone representation. Experimental results show that such feature-guided stippling leads to the production of stylistic and feature-emphasizing dot illustrations.