Saliency-based relief generation

Abstract Relief is a special art form that differs from painting and other round sculpture, and is traditionally created by laborious hand carving. Existing methods for digital relief generation focus on direct geometric compression, which transforms a three-dimensional (3D) mesh into a detail-preserving surface with a shallow depth, indicating the presence of 3D figures. We propose to add saliency information into digital relief generation. Novel saliency extraction methods are introduced to preserve relief features, and then a non-linear boosting of details is adopted to generate the final relief models. This work seamlessly combines visual perception and geometrical processing.