Mural Sketch Generation via Style-aware Convolutional Neural Network

Sketch is one of the most important art expression forms for traditional Chinese painting. This paper presents a complete sketch generation framework for ancient mural paintings. First, we propose a deep learning network to perform mural-to-sketch prediction by combining meaningful convolutional features in a holistic manner. A dedicated mural database with fine-grained ground truth is built for network training and testing. Then we design a style-aware image fusion approach by detecting the specific feature region in a mural, from which the artistic style can be maximally preserved. Experimental results have demonstrated its validity in extracting style mural sketch. This work has the potential to provide a computer aided tool for artists and restorers to imitate and restore time-honored paintings.