“Corpus-Based Visual Synthesis: An Approach for Artistic Stylization” by Parag K. Mital, Mick Grierson, and Tim J Smith recreates the styles associated with Impressionism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism using algorithmic means. The process matches geometric representations of images to corpora of representative images in a database. The researchers also created an augmented reality “hallucination” which applies the stylization process to a feed from a camera mounted on augmented reality goggles. The project page includes a video that synthesizes Akira Kurosawa’s “Dreams” using an image database that of Van Gogh’s “Langlois Bridge at Arles.” The result is convincing and beautiful; I’d like to watch an entire movie this way. An accompanying paper, presented at ACM Symposium on Applied Perception 2013 lays out the technical details of the research. It would have been nice to interact with a working demo, but the powerpoint and paper are thorough enough for one to recreate the process independently.

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