Continuous glass patterns for painterly rendering

Glass patterns have been exhaustively studied both in the vision literature and from a purely mathematical point of view. We extend the related formalism to the continuous case and we show that continuous Glass patterns can be used for artistic imaging applications. The general idea is to replace natural texture present in an input image with synthetic painterly texture that is generated by means of a continuous Glass pattern, whose geometrical structure is controlled by the gradient orientation of the input image. The behavior of the proposed algorithm is analytically interpreted in terms of the theory of dynamical systems. Experimental results on a broad range of input images validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of lack of undesired artifacts, which are present with other existing methods, and easy interpretability of the input parameters.