Reconstructing Flowers from Sketches

Abstract

As the symbol of beauty, floral objects have been one of the most popular subjects of artistic drawing. However, designing 3D floral models is generally time- and resource-consuming, because of their structural and geometrical complexity. In this paper, we address the problem of reconstructing floral objects from sketch input. The user draws a relatively clean sketch of a flower and a few additional guide markings from an arbitrary view to rapidly create quality geometric models of flowers. Our system offers a novel modeling scheme compared to several existing flower modelers accepting sketch as input, where the user is required to work with different views, providing step-by-step sketch input. Given the silhouette and the guide strokes, an assumed, common botanical structure is estimated, i.e. a cone for each ring of petals. The cones and the silhouette sketch that we segment into elementary curves are used to retrieve model elements from the pre-constructed shape database. These elements are then placed together around the cone, where an additional, per-element deformation is performed so as to maximize the silhouette similarity between the user sketch and the 3D flower model from the chosen view. Our system has shown to robustly create a variety of flowers in various configurations, including flower models with several petal layers and various blooming degrees, drawn from different views.