# Im2Oil: Stroke-Based Oil Painting Rendering with Linearly Controllable Fineness Via Adaptive Sampling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.13219 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13219/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [A Neural Representation of Sketch Drawings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03477/) (2017)
- [Learning to Paint With Model-based Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04411/) (2019)
- [Paint Transformer: Feed Forward Neural Painting with Stroke Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03798/) (2021)
- [Stylized Neural Painting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08114/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Style Transfer: From Pixels to Parameterized Brushstrokes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17185/) (2021)
- [Sketch Generation with Drawing Process Guided by Vector Flow and Grayscale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09004/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Stroke-based Neural Painting and Stylization with Dynamically Predicted Painting Region](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03504/) (2023)
- [ArtRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Structured Context for Visual Art Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06020/) (2025)
- [Vectorized Region Based Brush Strokes for Artistic Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09969/) (2025)
- [Optimal Image Transport on Sparse Dictionaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01984/) (2023)
- [Artificial Intelligence for Geometry-Based Feature Extraction, Analysis and Synthesis in Artistic Images: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01450/) (2024)
- [Look, Compare and Draw: Differential Query Transformer for Automatic Oil Painting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27720/) (2026)
- [MambaPainter: Neural Stroke-Based Rendering in a Single Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12524/) (2024)
- [PaintFlow: A Unified Framework for Interactive Oil Paintings Editing and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08534/) (2025)
- [Data-Efficient Brushstroke Generation with Diffusion Models for Oil Painting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01103/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a novel stroke-based rendering (SBR) method that translates images into vivid oil paintings. Previous SBR techniques usually formulate the oil painting problem as pixel-wise approximation. Different from this technique route, we treat oil painting creation as an adaptive sampling problem. Firstly, we compute a probability density map based on the texture complexity of the input image. Then we use the Voronoi algorithm to sample a set of pixels as the stroke anchors. Next, we search and generate an individual oil stroke at each anchor. Finally, we place all the strokes on the canvas to obtain the oil painting. By adjusting the hyper-parameter maximum sampling probability, we can control the oil painting fineness in a linear manner. Comparison with existing state-of-the-art oil painting techniques shows that our results have higher fidelity and more realistic textures. A user opinion test demonstrates that people behave more preference toward our oil paintings than the results of other methods. More interesting results and the code are in https://github.com/TZYSJTU/Im2Oil.