OpenCV with Python Blueprints

Cartoonizing an image

Over the past few years, professional cartoonizer software has popped up all over the place. In order to achieve the basic cartoon effect, all that we need is a bilateral filter and some edge detection. The bilateral filter will reduce the color palette, or the numbers of colors that are used in the image. This mimics a cartoon drawing, wherein a cartoonist typically has few colors to work with. Then we can apply edge detection to the resulting image to generate bold silhouettes. The real challenge, however, lies in the computational cost of bilateral filters. We will thus use some tricks to produce an acceptable cartoon effect in real time.

We will adhere to the following procedure to transform an RGB color image into a cartoon: ...