nickc92/imagemosaic

Generating Image Mosaics

This is the code associated with this post. It contains code to optimize image mosaics, and to render them at higher resolution.

Usage

In mosaic.py, there are a few variables at the top to set:

DO_GREYSCALE = False        # render in greyscale
DO_GREYSCALE_MATCH = False  # do image matching in greyscale
TRANSPARENCY = 0.3          # transparency of tiles. 0=opaque
CIRCLE_DIV = 36             # tile rotation discretization = 360 deg / CIRCLE_DIV.
                            # set CIRCLE_DIV=1 for no rotations
TILE_LONG_SIDE = 55         # the longer edge of the tile will be sized to this many pixels

Then it is run as follows:

python mosaic.py target_image tile_image_dir

mosaic.py will consider all .jpg files in tile_image_dir to be candidate tiles.

As it is optimizing, it periodically will write an image file result.jpg that you can examine. It also creates a file, plan.txt, that is used in rendering.

Rendering

You can create a higher-resolution version of your mosaic, using the plan.txt file that mosaic.py outputs, for the purposes of printing or whatnot:

renderPlan.py repro_image planfile scale

• repro_image is generally the result.jpg that mosaic.py produces;
• planfile is generally plan.txt that mosaic.py produces;
• scale: if repro_image is NxN pixels, then the rendered image will be (scale N)x(scale N) pixels.

renderPlan.py produces a file render.jpg.