A paintbrush-like image transformation is proposed in this paper. One of the goals of the method is to transform the image into a representation that is very similar to the human sensation of artistic images. We introduce a sequential multiscale image decomposition method, based on simple simulated paintbrush-strokes. The resulting images look like good-quality paintings, with an acceptable distortion compared to the original bit-map. The image can be described with the parameters of the paintbrush-strokes, resulting in a parameter-series that can be used for compression. The quality of the "painted" images are tested by using masked Gabor-filters fitted to the Human Visual System (HVS). The painting process can be applied for scale-space image representation, segmentation and contour detection, and image coding.

#6 Painted up to brush size 26 x 7 #9 Painted up to brush size 10 x 3

Our algorithm is