The conversion from line drawings to paintings with paper-cutting designs

The craft of paper-cutting is part of the folk art traditions of cultures all over the world. If we could convert such arts works as comic strips, line drawings, gongbi paintings and calligraphy which are displayed by lines to paintings with paper- cutting designs, there will be broad application prospect. This paper converts grayscale images to binary images with the use of the combination of automatic processing and users´ selection with multiple thresholds; in the conversion from the line drawings to paintings with paper-cutting designs, the system first calculates the numbers of the regions and then different regions will be connected automatically according to the principle of proximity. Simultaneously, the function of users´ selection is added considering the stability of paper-cuttings. After the vectorization of the resulting designs, beautiful and elaborate paper-cuttings are generated with the use of automatic carving machines.