Painted Stained Glass

Abstract

We propose a new region-based method for stained glass rendering of an input photograph. We achieve more regular region sizes than previous methods by using simple linear iterative clustering, or SLIC, to obtain tile boundaries. The SLIC regions respect image edges but provide an oversegmentation suitable for stained glass. We distinguish between important boundaries that match image edges, and unimportant boundaries that do not; we then resegment regions with unimportant boundaries to create more regular regions. We assign colors to stained glass tiles; lastly, we apply a painting layer to the simplified image, restoring fine details that cannot be conveyed by the tile shapes alone. This last step is analogous to the overpainting done in real-world stained glass. The outcome is a stylized image that offers a better representation of the original image content than has been available from earlier stained glass filters, while still conveying the sense of a stained glass image.