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Photomosaics

All > "Art" > Photomosaics by tsmaster

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When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail - so I was considering what I could do with an image rescaling function, and it occurred to me that I could assemble photomosaics. A little more noodling suggested that grabbing album covers from Amazon.com would be one of the easier sources of square, recognizable, images.

I wrote a program to assemble the photomosaics. The basic technique is pretty simple. First, decide how many tiles you want in the mosaic. Let's say that's 10x10. Then, decide on a sub-tile resolution - the size of the details you want to represent. Maybe you want to break the tiles into a 3x3 grid, which is what I used for most of the album mosaics you see here. If your tiles are non-square (like coming from a TV source), you might want a different aspect ratio, like 4x3 or 5x3.

Then, multiply these two sizes together (10x10 x 3x3) to get the working size of your "big picture" image (30x30 in this case). Resize the big picture to that size as a reference, resize all of your candidate tile artwork to the sub-tile resolution (3x3), and then iterate over every tile location, doing a least-squares fit of the tile art's pixels to the working picture's pixels at that location. There's room to fiddle with that fit calculation - I matched in RGB space, but maybe YUV or some other space would have been better.

Finally, once you know what tiles go where, assemble the final mosaic using the original (higher res) version of the tile artwork.


Higher Res versions (and some pictures that I couldn't post here) are HERE.

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My first photomosaic ever: Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

I chose this for its combination of recognizability and bright colors. One thing I quickly recognized (but didn't fix until much later) was the reuse of tiles - if you've got a solid patch, like the blue sky here, the algorithm I described above doesn't have any problem picking the same tile over and over.

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Paul Simon: Negotiations and Love Songs

Phil Collins has a surprising tendency to show up at the boundary between white and black. That sounds like a metaphor for something.

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They Might Be Giants: Flood

Somehow, the low number of colors used in the source image seems to work well with the tile artwork I had available. Also, I was pleased how the "FLOOD" logo popped out from the background.

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Neon Brown: Fiber

Hey, the algorithm even works on obscure bands!

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Pet Shop Boys: Introspective

I was curious to see how this album cover would turn out, as it has such simple, pure colors. As expected, the algorithm selected many duplicate tiles.

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Phil Collins: No Jacket Required

Part of the balance (or "art", if you like) of making an effective mosaic is selecting how many tiles to use - the more tiles, the easier it is to capture details, but the less impressive the mosaic is. I think it's interesting to see a recognizable face emerge from a small number of tiles.

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The Beatles: Abbey Road

One of the most recognizable album covers ever, this one was executed at 20 tiles x 20 tiles, and you definitely know what you're looking at. I'd still like to go back to it and clean up the sky - they're all "Flock of Seagulls" albums, which is somewhat disappointing.

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They Might Be Giants

I rewrote the program about this point, and switched from album art to frames I grabbed from "Gigantic", the They Might Be Giants documentary. After I had hung it on the wall, I realized that I had squashed the big picture image to match the aspect ratio of the tiles, which was unintentional.

John's red striped shirt was made possible by a few scenes where the band was performing under red lights.

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Serenity: River

I rewrote the program again about this time, adding a little bit of "dithering" to mix up the images used in solid-color spaces. This was part of a triptych I made - one of River, one of the ship, and one of the crew. This one turned out the best. Tile images were taken from the TV show and the movie.

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Serenity Triptych, Framed

As hanging on my wall. The picture of River is most satisfying for a couple reasons that I can think of:

- The composition of the River picture is pretty compelling. Brooding chick in the left of frame, contrasting with a white field with ominous police-shapes on the right.

- The ship image isn't as recognizable as a human face. Also, for some reason, the algorithm was choking on the subtle shading necessary to capture the dust clouds around the ship.

- The crew are recognizable, but you'd like to see their faces more clearly, but the features of their faces are down around the resolution of the tiles, so you end up only getting suggestions of who's who. It works if you don't get too close.

Also check out this page for higher res versions.

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