Artist Agent: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Automatic Stroke Generation in Oriental Ink Painting

Abstract

Oriental ink painting, called Sumi-e, is one of the most distinctive painting styles and has attracted artists around the world. Major challenges in Sumi-e simulation are to abstract complex scene information and reproduce smooth and natural brush strokes. To automatically generate such strokes, we propose to model the brush as a reinforcement learning agent, and let the agent learn the desired brush-trajectories by maximizing the sum of rewards in the policy search framework. To achieve better performance, we provide elaborate design of actions, states, and rewards specifically tailored for a Sumi-e agent. The effectiveness of our proposed approach is demonstrated through experiments on Sumi-e simulation.