Curve-based image warping for product styling

In early industrial product design activities, stylists are used to take inspiration from already existing products or elements present in nature. Nowadays, the world wide web offers a great amount of images which are easy available and usable for idea stimulation and generation. Easily accessing and modifying the content of these digital images would be very useful for the specification and visualization of new shapes and thus, for browsing alternative solutions. An effortless modification can occur only if the critical elements in the image can be handled as parametric curves and surfaces in CAD systems. To this aim, various problems have to be faced and solved. First, parametric curves should be detected from the image. It is crucial that not all the curves detectable from the image are reconstructed, which would results in too many pieces, but only those effectively meaningful from the designer point of view. These curves are those corresponding to the main feature lines characterizing the product shape affecting either the overall and details' appearance. Second, suitable image warping techniques have to be devised able to distorting the image elements to correctly simulate the surface modification according to the characteristic curve changes as it would result if changes were occurred in the real 3D surface.