Image abstraction through overlapping region growth

We propose a region-based abstraction of a photograph, where the image plane is covered by overlapping irregularly shaped regions that approximate the image content. We segment regions using a novel region growth algorithm intended to produce highly irregular regions that still respect image edges, different from conventional segmentation methods that encourage compact regions. The final result has reduced detail, befitting abstraction, but still contains some small structures such as highlights; thin features and crooked boundaries are retained, while interior details are softened, yielding a painting-like abstraction effect.