Pixelated Image Abstraction

NPAR 2012, Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Non-photorealistic Animation and Rendering, June 2012

Timothy Gerstner, Doug DeCarlo, Marc Alexa,
Adam Finkelstein, Yotam Gingold, Andrew Nealen

Pixel art images simultaneously use very few pixels and a tiny color palette. Attempts to represent image (a) using only 22x32 pixels and 8 colors using (b) nearest-neighbor or (c) cubic downsampling (both followed by median cut color quantization), result in detail loss and blurriness. We optimize over a set of superpixels (d) and an associated color palette to produce output (e) in the style of pixel art.

We present an automatic method that can be used to abstract high resolution images into very low resolution outputs with reduced color palettes in the style of pixel art. Our method simultaneously solves for a mapping of features and a reduced palette needed to construct the output image. The results are an approximation to the results generated by pixel artists. We compare our method against the results of a naive process common to image manipulation programs, as well as the hand-crafted work of pixel artists. Through a formal user study and interviews with expert pixel artists we show that our results offer an improvement over the naive methods.

Paper (9MB pdf)
Paper (1MB pdf)

Timothy Gerstner, Doug DeCarlo, Marc Alexa, Adam Finkelstein, Yotam Gingold, and Andrew Nealen.
"Pixelated Image Abstraction."
NPAR 2012, Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Non-photorealistic Animation and Rendering, June 2012.

@inproceedings{Gerstner:2012:PIA,
   author = "Timothy Gerstner and Doug DeCarlo and Marc Alexa and Adam Finkelstein
      and Yotam Gingold and Andrew Nealen",
   title = "Pixelated Image Abstraction",
   booktitle = "NPAR 2012, Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on
      Non-photorealistic Animation and Rendering",
   year = "2012",
   month = jun
}