🎨 Image to Cartoon Converter (Basic Image Processing)

Turn your photos into cartoon-style images 🎭 using simple image processing techniques — no deep learning required, no dataset needed!

We follow the algorithm described in:

Shruti Kumari Shrivastava, Ruchi Gajjar
Image Processing based Image to Cartoon Generation: Reducing complexity of large computation arising from Deep Learning
IEEE, 2023 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Sustainable Engineering Solutions (CISES).
[DOI: 10.1109/CISES58720.2023.10183524]

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✨ Features

• 🧹 Noise removal with Median filter
• ✂️ Edge detection & enhancement with Canny + Dilation
• 🎨 Color simplification with Quantization
• 🖼️ Outputs a cartoon-like image with bold edges and flat colors
• ⚡ Lightweight: runs with OpenCV + NumPy, no GPU or training needed

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🧩 Algorithm Pipeline

Implementation strictly follows the algorithm proposed in the referenced paper:

1. Input: Original RGB image
2. Noise Removal → Median Filter (removes salt & pepper noise)
3. Edge Detection → Convert to grayscale + Canny Edge Detector
4. Edge Enhancement → Morphological Dilation (thickens lines)
5. Image Smoothing → Averaging Filter (reduces details for flat colors)
6. Color Quantization →

NewValue = floor(p / (a-b)) * (a+b)

(with constants a and b controlling number of color bins)
7. Combine edges with quantized image → Final cartoon image

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📸 Example Results

Below are the six outputs you’ll get when running the code:

Original	Canny Edges	Thickened Edges

Smoothed	Quantized	Final Cartoon

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⚙️ Installation & Usage

Requirements

• Python 3.8+
• OpenCV
• NumPy
• Matplotlib

Install dependencies:

pip install opencv-python numpy matplotlib


### Run Script

```bash
python cartoonizer.py

Edit the image_path variable in cartoonizer.py with your image, e.g.:

image_path = "your_photo.jpg"

The output will be saved as:

your_photo_cartoon.png

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📂 Project Structure

├── cartoonizer.py       # Main Python script
├── README.md            # Project documentation
├── images/              # Place before/after examples here
│   ├── original.jpg
│   ├── canny.jpg
│   ├── thickened.jpg
│   ├── smoothed.jpg
│   ├── quantized.jpg
│   └── cartoon.jpg

📚 Reference

• Shruti Kumari Shrivastava, Ruchi Gajjar, Image Processing based Image to Cartoon Generation: Reducing complexity of large computation arising from Deep Learning, 2023 IEEE CISES. DOI: 10.1109/CISES58720.2023.10183524

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Future Updagrades (coming soon)

A React.js based frontend with proper Anime-like Cartoon generation based on AnimeGAN and other pretrained models