Image-based bas-relief generation with gradient operation.

Abstract

Bas-relief is a type of sculpture artwork which is carved into a plane or a surface, traditionally created by hand. Recently, computers have been adopted to assist the design and production of relief works. In this paper, we propose a novel method to generate the 3D mesh of a relief based on a 2D image input. Gradient operations, such as magnitude attenuation and unsharp masking, are introduced to convert an image into a relief. The Poisson equation is solved for the construction of the depth information of a relief from the tuned data. The final output as geometric mesh enables artists or designers to add additional texture and material features for their relief design. More importantly, such a mesh can be directly used for computer aided manufacturing as input.