Line drawing for 3D printing.

This paper focuses on the problem of generating a line drawing from a given image for fused deposition modeling. The abstracted line drawing, comprising of lines with a single color and thickness, would preserve both tone and edges of the input image. We first partition the image into sub-regions manually. The boundaries of the sub-regions are extracted as the feature lines of the image. Next, a proper number of points are randomly placed on the image plane with a density proportional to the darkness of the image. We use Lloyd’s method to push the sampling points away from each other and the feature lines. The points within each sub-region are then connected by solving a travelling salesman problem (TSP). Finally, we further optimize the fairness and the spacing of the lines by minimizing a tailored objective function. A variety of experimental results are presented to show the effectiveness of our method for generating line drawings for 3D printing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]