Best Technical Paper award at SIGGRAPH 2022
© 2022 EPFL
The paper "CLIPasso: Semantically-Aware Object Sketching" by Yael Vinker, Ehsan Pajouheshgar, Jessica Y. Bo, Roman Bachmann, Amit Haim Bermano, Daniel Cohen-Or, Amir Zamir and Ariel Shamir received the Best Technical Paper award at SIGGRAPH 2022. Ehsan is a PhD student of IVRL since 2021.
Our work converts an image of an object to a sketch, allowing for varying levels of abstraction, while preserving its key visual features.
Even with a very minimal representation (the rightmost flamingo and horse are drawn with only a few strokes), one can recognize both the semantics and the structure of the subject depicted.
Abstraction is at the heart of sketching due to the simple and minimal nature of line drawings. Abstraction entails identifying the essential visual properties of an object or scene, which requires semantic understanding and prior knowledge of high-level concepts. Abstract depictions are therefore challenging for artists, and even more so for machines. We present an object sketching method that can achieve different levels of abstraction, guided by geometric and semantic simplifications. While sketch generation methods often rely on explicit sketch datasets for training, we utilize the remarkable ability of CLIP (Contrastive-Language-Image-Pretraining) to distill semantic concepts from sketches and images alike. We define a sketch as a set of Bézier curves and use a differentiable rasterizer to optimize the parameters of the curves directly with respect to a CLIP-based perceptual loss. The abstraction degree is controlled by varying the number of strokes. The generated sketches demonstrate multiple levels of abstraction while maintaining recognizability, underlying structure, and essential visual components of the subject drawn.
See more on: https://clipasso.github.io/clipasso/