pic: FIRST mosaic

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by Denman

where can i get the orginal logo on the black background?

It's the second one under "for electronic application" on this page.

[Ian Curtis]

http://www.usfirst.org/4vol/resource...ics/index.html

edit:
Here's the picture itself http://www.usfirst.org/4vol/resource...or_rev_rgb.jpg

[ZZII 527]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

I don't think it would be that big of a coding nightmare. Calculate the average pixel color of the piece you're trying to match, then shift each pixel in the image you're matching into it a certain percent towards what that color is. You just need to average out the two RGB values.

Yea it wouldn't be that bad. The trick to it is not adjusting pixel-by-pixel, because that would be cheating. It would be like blending it with the original in photoshop. The non-cheating (that is still debatable) way to do it, I think, is by adjusting the color properties of whole images to match the segment of the large image more closely. Most photomosaic programs do this, or at least have it as an option. This way, your code still needs to be somewhat good at matching colors and shapes, you are just making up for a small image selection. The code is still not too ugly: compare average colors on an image-by-image basis, rather than a pixel-by-pixel basis. I'm going to see if I can collect more images, first, because that gives a wider color selection without any modification to the pictures themselves. But color shifting, even image-by-image, is certainly not impossible to code. I might give it a shot...or you can!

[Ellery]

Greg,

You seem to have too much time on your hands right now

[ZZII 527]

Interesting fact:

The photomosaic is actualy patented by a company called Runaway Technology. I originally thought this patent applied only to their specific method/code. However, it seems that the patent covers photomosaics in general. From their website:

Photomosaic "look and feel" are protected by the patent, copyright, and other intellectual property laws of the United States and other major countries. We protect these rights vigilantly.

I suppose that's why AndreaMosiac is freeware - any attempt to commercialize it would probably be illegal.

Even more interestingly (at least to me) is that the CEO of Runaway Technology, a man named Robert Silvers, invented the photomosaic in 1996 - while a student at the MIT Media Lab! Seeing as my photomosaic of the apple picture (taken by Doc Edgerton, also an MIT alumni and professor) will be displayed in the Edgerton Center, about a half a mile from the Media Lab, I think I'll be safe from any patent problems... If not, I'm sure the Edgerton Center would be glad to take it down and have Runaway Technology make us one...maybe for free.

I've seen a lot of third-party photomosaic software on the web and I have written my own code for producing halfway-decent photomosaics without researching anyone elses method. I'm sure the Runaway Technology method is much better, and I still think that Robert Silvers does deserve the credit for coming up with the idea first, but I think the reason it was never done before '96 was not because nobody else could have programmed it, but because computers just didn't have the power to process images that quickly. So when computers are powerful enough to process videomosaics, I am going to patent that.