05-20-2005 11:26 PM

Alex Golec

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

This mosaic is unbelievable!!!

If a blown up version were to be printed on a poster, it could be a great aid in presentations and promotion of FIRST and robotics teams. Great job with this amazing piece!

_Alex

05-20-2005 11:26 PM

Beth Sweet

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

Greg, is there any chance that you can make this into like, a huge image so that we can see the individual pictures?

05-20-2005 11:55 PM

Greg Needel

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

i have a huge version of this 12+ meg that is sized to be printed 48" x 42"
if i can find somewhere to host it i would be happy to put it out there. also if anyone has a large gallery of photos from the championship i would be glad to re render this with those photos

05-21-2005 07:25 AM

Ashley Weed

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

Amazing! Did you create this yourself? Or, use another source (online) to create it? Great Job!

05-21-2005 10:11 AM

Greg Marra

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

I notice you're repeating photos (or have a bunch of really, really similar ones). Perhaps you could get a collection going where people could send you their photos so you could make an even better mosaic (both in terms of not repeating and better color matching).

What software did you use to make that? I used AndreaMosaic for my Team 177 Mosaic. That was about 500 photos with no repeats. We culled video frames to get filler, since even with everyones photos we still didn't have enough!

05-21-2005 11:03 AM

santosh

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

That is the coolest thing ever. How long did it take you to do?

05-21-2005 11:42 AM

Greg Needel

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

I used AndreaMosaic to do this, i had a batch of about 400 photos so there are repeats, and with 3000 pixels wide it took about 30 mins to render. there are 1500 tiles and the natural print size of this is 48 x 42. I am probably going to play with this in the next few days using photos from the last few years and a bunch of nationals photos as well. Total i believe i have about 1,200 photos but i need to play with the options a little more. Once i am 100% satisfied with the result i will put it on an FTP for everyone to download and use for whatever they want.

05-21-2005 11:57 AM

Ryan M.

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

I'd be willing to host it if you need it. Granted, you won't get 700kb/s downloads, but hey... I'm free.

PM me if you'd like and I'll setup an FTP account you can send it to.

P.S. Very nice job.

05-21-2005 03:54 PM

tiffany34990

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

this is just wonderful!!! i absolutely love it!! boy i love FIRST ppl and their creativity and well time to put things like this together!

great job!!! yay for FIRST!!

05-22-2005 12:49 AM

ZZII 527

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

Excellent job! I'm sure it will look AMAZING when you render it with 1,200+ images. Out of curiosity, I ran the logo through my "home-made" photomosaic code with about 1,000 images from Team 97's 2005 season. It came out pretty decent:



The coloring in yours is better - I think AndreaMosaic has some nice code for slightly adjusting the color values of the small images to match the large one more closely. I don't think I'm going to venture into that coding nightmare... Mine renders in 3 minutes, though. (I pre-reduced all the images to 640x480 to reduce loading time.)

Here's the big one if anyone wants to see the details:

http://web.mit.edu/scolton/www/logo.jpg

(I've got webspace on a fast MIT server - I'd be glad to host your final render if you'd like.)

So yea you can make a pretty good photomosaic out of any large set of images...and it is an excellent thing to display in pits or give to sponsors as a gift. AndreaMosaic works great - or you can try your hand at writing a custom program. (Cummon all you potential/actual comp. sci. majors...it's fun! )

Again, great idea, Greg! Sorry if I kinda ruined the show by posting the apple one a few hours ahead of you. ...didn't mean to.

05-22-2005 09:15 AM

Denman

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

I can host it too, if you wish, for free naturally

05-22-2005 09:17 AM

Denman

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

i might try one when i get the rest of our team photos in... with a dvd of photos, theres got to be a lot lol

05-22-2005 04:35 PM

Greg Marra

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

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.

05-22-2005 04:43 PM

Denman

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

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

05-22-2005 04:56 PM

Pat Fairbank

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

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

05-22-2005 04:57 PM

Ian Curtis

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

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

05-22-2005 06:58 PM

ZZII 527

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

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!

05-22-2005 11:41 PM

Ellery

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

Greg,

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

05-23-2005 09:48 AM

ZZII 527

Re: pic: FIRST mosaic

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:

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.