An Efficient Reversible Digital Oil Painting Technique for Smartphone and Tablet Users

With the increase in mobility in technology, artists are looking for ways to create paintings using their tablets and smartphones while on the move. Digital oil painting is a revolutionary technique where an artist uses digital paintbrush to simulate the traditional bristle paintbrush of a painting to get an oil paint image. In this article, we propose a novel realistic technique for reversible digital oil painting to accelerate the users to (re)paint an oil paint image to convey the surrounding atmosphere, express their emotions and feelings, or showcase a time of day or type of weather through that painting. Realism is all about accuracy. To repaint, the original image is retrieved from the existing oil paint image by reversing the pixels to its original value. We derive a mathematical expression to determine the probability of a pixel, with a set of neighbor pixels, being oil painted to get an oil paint image of the desired quality, which reduces the time and space complexities of the technique. We also develop prototypes on Android, Windows, and Ubuntu operating systems that successfully implement the proposed technique.