Paint Your Place Application for Optimizing Digital Painting of an Image

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-2016275702-A1
Application number	US-201615053852-A
Country	US
Kind code	A1
Filing date	Feb 25, 2016
Priority date	Mar 17, 2015
Publication date	Sep 22, 2016
Grant date	—

Abstract

A user-facing front end screen display of an illustrative digital image painting application includes a bucket tool which enables a user to apply a selected color to a selected area of an uploaded digital image such as a wall of a room, a paint brush tool to fill in missed areas, an eraser tool is to remove misapplied color, masking tools to mask off selected areas, and a tolerance slider tool to assist in properly filling in painted areas. Improved image preprocessing methods enable better definition of areas of the image to be painted the same color.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1 . An automated method for enabling a user to paint an image uploaded to a computer display device, the automated method comprising:
employing one or more computers to perform a plurality of operations in conjunction with a computer readable medium or media and a computer controlled display apparatus, the operations comprising generating a first display on said computer controlled display apparatus the first display comprising:
a display of a room image uploaded by a user;
a display of at least one color selected by the user;
a first icon comprising a link enabling selection of a paint brush tool;
a second icon comprising a link enabling selection of an eraser tool; and
a third icon comprising a link enabling selection of a masking tool;
enabling the user to perform a paint bucket operation to apply a selected color to a first area of the uploaded image; enabling the user to employ the paint brush tool to fill an area which was missed during application of the selected color to the first area; enabling the user to employ the eraser tool to remove color which bled into an undesired area during application of the selected color; and enabling the user to employ the masking tool to mask off a selected area of said room image such that color will not be applied to that selected area.

2 . The method of claim 1 further comprising generating a display of a tolerance slider tool on said first display and enabling the user to employ the slider tool to either increase or decrease the area painted.

3 . The method of claim 2 wherein the display of the tolerance slider tool comprises a darkened area within a right triangle which may be pulled to the left or right to either increase or decrease the area painted.

4 . The method of claim 1 wherein selection of the paint brush icon causes a brush size selection display configured to enable the user to select from among a plurality of different sized brushes, each of the different sized brushes enabling coverage of a different sized area.

5 . The method of claim 4 wherein the brush tool is represented on the first display by a moveable circle whose radius corresponds to the brush size selected on the brush size selection display.

6 . The method of claim 1 wherein said masking tool enables a user to block of an area not to be painted with a straight line.

7 . The method of claim 1 wherein said masking tool enables a user to generate a polygon on said first display to mask off an area within the polygon.

8 . The method of claim 1 wherein said paint bucket operation comprises clicking on a selected color and then clicking on an area to which the selected color is to be applied.

9 . The method of claim 1 wherein said paint bucket operation employs a mouse-moveable bucket icon.

10 . The method of claim 1 wherein the first area painted is one of a wall, a ceiling or a door.

11 . A non-transitory computer readable medium or media have computer readable program code embodied therein, said computer readable program code adapted to be executed by one or more computers to implement a method comprising
generating a first display on a computer controlled display apparatus, the first display comprising:
a display of a room image uploaded by a user;
a display of at least one color selected by the user,
a first icon comprising a link enabling selection of a paint brush tool;
a second icon comprising a link enabling selection of an eraser tool; and
a third icon comprising a link enabling selection of a masking tool;
enabling the user to perform a paint bucket operation to apply a selected color to a first area of the uploaded image; enabling the user to employ the paint brush tool to fill an area which was missed during application of the selected color to the first area; enabling the user to employ the eraser tool to remove color which bled into an undesired area during application of the selected color; and enabling the user to employ the masking tool to mask off a selected area of said room image such that color will not be applied to that selected area.

12 . The method of claim 11 further comprising generating a display of a tolerance slider tool on said first display and enabling the user to employ the slider tool to either increase or decrease the area painted.

13 . The method of claim 12 wherein the display of the tolerance slider tool comprises a darkened area within a right triangle which may be pulled to the left or right to either increase or decrease the area painted.

14 . Apparatus comprising: a display device; at least one computing device; and associated data storage memory, the display device, at least one computing device and associated data storage memory being configured to generate a display on the display device of a room image uploaded by a user and to enable the user to perform a paint bucket operation to apply a selected color to a first area of the uploaded image, the display further comprising:
a first icon comprising a link enabling selection of a paint brush tool to fill an area which was missed during application of the selected color to the first area; a second icon comprising a link enabling selection of an eraser tool to remove color which bled into an undesired area during application of the selected color; and a third icon comprising a link enabling selection of a masking tool to mask off an area which is not to be painted.

15 . The apparatus of claim 14 further comprising generating a display of a tolerance slider tool on said first display and enabling the user to employ the slider tool to either increase or decrease the area painted.

16 . The method of claim 15 wherein the display of the tolerance slider tool comprises a darkened area within a right triangle which may be pulled to the left or right to either increase or decrease the area painted.

17 . A method of preprocessing an uploaded digital image employing one or more programmed computers, the method comprising:
running a bilateral smoothing algorithm in order to remove noise from flat surfaces of the image while retaining the integrity of edges in the image and color differences; running Sobel and Canny edge detection algorithms against the image and storing the image data resulting from running the Canny algorithm separately from the image data resulting from running the Sobel algorithm; executing a floodfill algorithm on the Sobel image data to perform segmentation of the image into segments having the same color, wherein the floodfill algorithm is modified to account for the natural gradient of the Sobel algorithm, thereby allowing the definition of one or more tolerances for the definition of edges in the image; and if an edge of a segment determined by application of the floodfill algorithm and the Sobel algorithm is within a selected tolerance of a Canny edge, pulling the paint color assigned to that segment to the Canny edge.

18 . The method of claim 17 further comprising:
averaging the pixel color of an area identified for segmentation over the area as a whole;
iterating the average pixel color of the area through previously found segments to determine whether the area has the same or similar average pixel color as previously found segments; and
if it does, associating the area with the previously found color.

19 . The method of claim 18 further comprising:
averaging all associated segments out to define a base luminosity for the same color across multiple segments; and
storing a segment under analysis with it

Assignees

• Behr Process Corp

Inventors

• Reynolds Damien
• Milsom Douglas
• Giosa Vincent

Classifications

• G06F40/134

  Hyperlinking · CPC title

• G06T11/10

  Texturing; Colouring; Generation of textures or colours (retouching, inpainting or scratch removal G06T5/77) · CPC title

• G06T2200/24

  involving graphical user interfaces [GUIs] · CPC title

• G06F3/04842 Primary

  Selection of displayed objects or displayed text elements (G06F3/0482 takes precedence) · CPC title

• G06T2207/20104

  Interactive definition of region of interest [ROI] · CPC title