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I appreciate the fact that the drawings are made by real people. Still, I wonder how much better these actually are compared to a carefully customized set of photoshop filters.

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There's certainly an air to having your dot sketch in the WSJ from what I hear, though I imagine that's faded after its years of remodeling itself and its time under new ownership. That said, the difficulties with using an algorithmic filter for creating this stipple effect are, based on my past attempts:

(1) robustness to lighting conditions

(2) recognition of continuous shapes, such as hats (captured well in [1])

(3) avoiding stipple effect on facial features (e.g. lips, eyes)

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that I haven't been clever enough to encode it correctly. :)

[1] http://gazeandstare.com/pic/nolinovak_01.gif

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