Abstract
Image-guided drawing can compensate for a lack of skill but often requires a significant number of repetitive strokes to create textures. Existing automatic stroke synthesis methods are usually limited to predefined styles or require indirect manipulation that may break the spontaneous flow of drawing. We present an assisted drawing system to autocomplete repetitive short strokes during a user’s normal drawing process. Users draw over a reference image as usual; at the same time, our system silently analyzes the input strokes and the reference to infer strokes that follow the user’s input style when certain repetition is detected. Users can accept, modify, or ignore the system’s predictions and continue drawing, thus maintaining fluid control over drawing. Our key idea is to jointly analyze image regions and user input history to detect and predict repetition. The proposed system can effectively reduce the user’s workload when drawing repetitive short strokes, helping users to create results with rich patterns.

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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Li-Yi Wei for his insightful comments and suggestions. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for feedback, and funding from Adobe Research and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Project-ID 251654672-TRR 161.
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Yilan Chen received her Ph.D. degree from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. Her research interests include computer graphics and human-computer interaction.
Kin Chung Kwan received his B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2009 and 2015, respectively. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz. His research interests include computer graphics and human-computer interaction.
Hongbo Fu is a professor in the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Previously, he had postdoctoral research training at the Imager Lab, University of British Columbia, Canada, and the Department of Computer Graphics, Max-Planck-Institut Informatik, Germany. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2007 and his B.S. degree in information sciences from Peking University, China, in 2002. His primary research interests fall in the fields of computer graphics and human-computer interaction. He has served as an associate editor of The Visual Computer, Computers & Graphics, and Computer Graphics Forum.
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Chen, Y., Kwan, K.C. & Fu, H. Autocompletion of repetitive stroking with image guidance. Comp. Visual Media 9, 581–596 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-022-0288-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-022-0288-2
Keywords
- interaction
- autocompletion
- digital drawing
- prediction
- texture synthesis