

Ask HN: Artistic Image Reconstruction Algorithms - Whitespace

A recent HN post (http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1663421) described a novel approach in which a source image was reduced to a series of points which was then passed to a TSP solver, whose output was an approximate visualization of the original image (http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/projects/tsp/).<p>I find such art mentally pleasing from a mathematics perspective as well as highly approachable by any viewer or aspiring artist (read as: myself).  Art of this form is usually extremely simplistic and cheap material-wise, which is a bonus.<p>I've previously used projectors to create my own images similar to Felice Varini (http://www.varini.org/02indc/indgen.html), which was an immensely rewarding experience.<p>I've recently moved to a new apartment where I have a large quantity of bare walls.  Being the type of person who can toil for hours on repetitive tasks, what other computational approaches towards recreating images can be used?  What tools can aid in creating such images? (ex: dynamically adapting the view frustum of a projected image so as to not cause visual distortion against a wall [note: undesired in the Varini example!])
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HardyLeung
I can't comment on Varini-like approaches, but I also happened to like the TSP
work. Other works that are also visually pleasing I would like to mention are:

\+ Roger Alsing's genetic algorithm work on using triangles to represent any
images (e.g. Mona Lisa) [http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-
programming-evolut...](http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-
evolution-of-mona-lisa/)

\+ Artistic word cloud, in particular Tagxedo (my creation, see
<http://www.tagxedo.com/gallery.html> for some examples). You can create a
word cloud using any shape as the outline.

\+ A variant of word cloud is what I'd call "Shape cloud", which is to use a
lot of shapes to form a cloud of a particular shape (see some examples here:
[http://blog.tagxedo.com/a-creative-abuse-of-fonts-words-
and-...](http://blog.tagxedo.com/a-creative-abuse-of-fonts-words-and-shapes)).
A famous example is a cloud of Google's products in the shape of Darth Vader
([http://erictric.com/2010/03/09/is-google-trying-to-take-
over...](http://erictric.com/2010/03/09/is-google-trying-to-take-over-the-
world/)). Another example is Steve Jobs' portrait using Apple's product
([http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/picture-
incre...](http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/picture-incredible-
steve-jobs-portrait-made-from-apple-products)), but this Jobs' portrait is
closer to Photomosaic (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographic_mosaic>),
which is also another fascinating idea from ages ago.

Incidentally, I think the TSP technique can be trivially improved by coloring
the edges and vertices, say, using averaging.

