Luma–chroma separated processing for fast flow‐based image abstraction on mobile devices

A fast method to generate cartoon‐style images is presented. The cartoon‐style image construction procedure consists of two processes: outline detection followed by colour filling. The outline detection operation is sensitive to image luminance (luma) and the colour‐filling operation is sensitive to chrominance (chroma). Using this feature, a fast method is proposed for generating cartoon‐style images based on luminance–chrominance (luma–chroma) separated processing. This method decreases the number of operations required for colour filling using a UV chroma component extracted from the YUV colour space. This approach is suitable for camera image formats and mobile SIMD units. Experimental tests demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits 221% faster processing time as compared to naïve methods. Moreover, the mean absolute error between naïve methods and the proposed method is < 1%.