Image-based pencil drawing synthesized using convolutional neural network feature maps

In most cases, the conventional pencil-drawing-synthesized methods were in terms of geometry and stroke, or only used classic edge detection method to extract image edge characters. In this paper, we propose a new method to produce pencil drawing from natural image. The synthesized result can not only generate pencil sketch drawing, but also can save the color tone of natural image and the drawing style is flexible. The sketch and style are learned from the edge of original natural image and one pencil image exemplar of artist’s work. They are accomplished through using the convolutional neural network feature maps of a natural image and an exemplar pencil drawing style image. Large-scale bound-constrained optimization (L-BFGS) is applied to synthesize the new pencil sketch whose style is similar to the exemplar pencil sketch. We evaluate the proposed method by applying it to different kinds of images and textures. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is better than conventional method in clarity and color tone. Besides, our method is also flexible in drawing style.