Abstract
Line drawing is a style of image abstraction where the perception of image is conveyed using distinct straight or curved lines. Such concise representation not only constitutes the fundamental element in many artistic stylizations, it also provides valuable priors for advanced image understanding. However, extracting semantically salient lines is not trivial and mastered only by skilled artists. While a significant effort has been made in automatic generation of line drawing, existing methods are sensitive to different parameter settings, and frequently result in either excessive or insufficient lines. We present EasyLineDraw, a sketch-based interactive system to facilitate extracting effective line drawings from arbitrary images. The user simply has to provide a few scribbles, based on which the system automatically infers lines that are coherent and similar in structure from a detailed line image. We tested our system on a wide variety of images across different experimental settings. Results show that our system is efficient and extracts concise line drawings that conform to user’s expectation.