Consistency maintenance of Do and Undo/Redo operations in real-time collaborative bitmap editing systems

Abstract

In real-time collaborative graphical editing systems, bitmap-based graphical editing systems are particularly special and practically useful ones, and Do and Undo/Redo operations are intricate problems in this field. However, existing researches on graphical editing systems are quite scanty. In this paper, based on Multi-version strategy, we propose a new approach to solve the Do and Undo/Redo consistency maintenance problems with due consideration of three possible cases: all-causal, all-independent and causal-independent-mixed operations. Compared with previous collaborative algorithms, the algorithms proposed in this paper support Do and Undo/Redo operations without requiring additional space. In addition, two example analyses are also given to prove the algorithms' effectiveness separately. Furthermore, the time complexity of the two algorithms is both O(n). Finally, a system prototype called bitmap-based Co-Graphical Editor is implemented to verify them realistically.