Artistic Style in Robotic Painting; a Machine Learning Approach to Learning Brushstroke from Human Artists

TL;DR

This paper presents a machine learning-based method for robotic painting that captures and reproduces an artist's unique brushstrokes and techniques, enhancing the artistic style transfer in robotic art creation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to learn and replicate an artist's brushstroke style through data collection, generative modeling, and integration with robotic painting systems.

Findings

71% of evaluators found brushstrokes artist-like

58% of viewers could not distinguish from human-made paintings

Successful integration of style transfer in robotic painting process

Abstract

Robotic painting has been a subject of interest among both artists and roboticists since the 1970s. Researchers and interdisciplinary artists have employed various painting techniques and human-robot collaboration models to create visual mediums on canvas. One of the challenges of robotic painting is to apply a desired artistic style to the painting. Style transfer techniques with machine learning models have helped us address this challenge with the visual style of a specific painting. However, other manual elements of style, i.e., painting techniques and brushstrokes of an artist, have not been fully addressed. We propose a method to integrate an artistic style to the brushstrokes and the painting process through collaboration with a human artist. In this paper, we describe our approach to 1) collect brushstrokes and hand-brush motion samples from an artist, and 2) train a generative model to generate brushstrokes that pertains to the artist's style, and 3) fine tune a stroke-based rendering model to work with our robotic painting setup. We will report on the integration of these three steps in a separate publication. In a preliminary study, 71% of human evaluators find our reconstructed brushstrokes are pertaining to the characteristics of the artist's style. Moreover, 58% of participants could not distinguish a painting made by our method from a visually similar painting created by a human artist.