A Revision Control System for Image Editing in Collaborative Multimedia Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel revision control system for digital images that stores revisions as graphs, integrates with Git, and supports collaborative multimedia editing, addressing limitations of existing binary file versioning methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a graph-based revision control system for images integrated with Git, improving storage efficiency and semantic understanding in collaborative multimedia editing.

Findings

System effectively manages image revisions as graphs.

Integration with Git facilitates artistic workflows.

Preliminary user study confirms usability.

Abstract

Revision control is a vital component in the collaborative development of artifacts such as software code and multimedia. While revision control has been widely deployed for text files, very few attempts to control the versioning of binary files can be found in the literature. This can be inconvenient for graphics applications that use a significant amount of binary data, such as images, videos, meshes, and animations. Existing strategies such as storing whole files for individual revisions or simple binary deltas, respectively consume significant storage and obscure semantic information. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we present a revision control system for digital images that stores revisions in form of graphs. Besides, being integrated with Git, our revision control system also facilitates artistic creation processes in common image editing and digital painting workflows. A preliminary user study demonstrates the usability of the proposed system.