Feature sensitive bas relief generation

Among all forms of sculpture, bas-relief is arguably the closest to painting. Although inherently a two dimensional sculpture, a bas-relief suggests a visual spatial extension of the scene in depth through the combination of composition, perspective, and shading. Most recently, there have been significant results on digital bas-relief generation but many of the existing techniques may wash out high level surface detail during the compression process. The primary goal of this work is to address the problem of fine features by tailoring a filtering technique that achieves good compression without compromising the quality of surface details. As a secondary application we explore the generation of artistic relief which mimic cubism in painting and we show how it could be used for generating Picasso like portraits. © 2009 IEEE.