Stroke-based stylization by learning sequential drawing examples

Among various traditional art forms, brush stroke drawing is one of the widely used styles in modern computer graphic tools such as GIMP, Photoshop and Painter. In this paper, we develop an AI-aided art authoring (A4) system of non-photorealistic rendering that allows users to automatically generate brush stroke paintings in a specific artist's style. Within the reinforcement learning framework of brush stroke generation proposed by Xie et al. (2012), the first contribution in this paper is the application of regularized policy gradient method, which is more suitable for the stroke generation task; the other contribution is to learn artists' drawing styles from video-captured stroke data by inverse reinforcement learning. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our system can successfully learn artists' styles and render pictures with consistent and smooth brush strokes.