DOHA: A scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), one of Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s (HBKU) national research institutes, has developed technology that can recreate painting styles of various artists.
QCRI’s Dr Mohamed Elgharib, along with collaborators from Trinity College in Dublin, has devised a technique that can reproduce moving images in an artist’s original style.
A paper about the technology, known as non-photo realistic rendering technique, will be presented at the world’s largest annual event in computer graphics and interactive techniques, the Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) conference in California on July 24.
The technology goes several steps further than current advances in recreating the painting styles of artists such as Vincent Van Gogh. For example, this new technique can maintain the structure of underlying objects in portraits, which are usually difficult to reproduce because abnormalities in people’s faces are easily spotted.
“In images like portraits it’s very important to maintain the structure of facial features and current approaches will corrupt them. We can more accurately capture the strokes of an original painting than other techniques,” Dr Elgharib said.
An example of the effect the technique can achieve is the film Loving Vincent, to release in September. The world’s first full-length painted animation film, which tells the story of the painter Vincent Van Gogh, will be made from 62,450 hand-painted frames completed by 85 painters in Van Gogh’s style.
The Peninsula
