Abstract
Digital mosaics have usually used regular tiles, simulating historical tessellated mosaics. In this paper, we present a method for synthesizing pebble mosaics, a historical mosaic style in which the tiles are rounded pebbles. We address both the tiling problem, of distributing pebbles over the image plane so as to approximate the input image content, and the problem of geometry, creating a smooth rounded shape for each pebble. We adopt simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) to obtain elongated tiles conforming to image content, and smooth the resulting irregular shapes into shapes resembling pebble cross-sections. Then, we create an interior and exterior contour for each pebble and solve a Laplace equation over the region between them to obtain height-field geometry. The resulting pebble set approximates the input image while representing full geometry that can be rendered and textured for a highly detailed representation of a pebble mosaic.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for many insightful comments. We also thank members of the Graphics, Imaging and Games Lab for productive comments and discussions. Funding for this work was provided by NSERC, OGS, and Carleton University.
We used many images from Flickr under a Creative Commons license. Thanks to the numerous photographers who provided material: Douglas Scortegagna (landscape), bDom (b&w portrait), Julio Romero (iguana), Peat Bakke (t-rex), Gábor Lengyel (portrait), Tommie Hansen (canal), Theen Moy (cat), JB Banks (dark woods), Richard Messenger (Yemeni), Greg Myers (tomatoes), sicknotepix (toque).
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Lars Doyle is a Ph.D. student in the School of Computer Science at Carleton University where he works in the Graphics, Imaging, and Games Lab. His research interests focus on image processing, image stylization, and super-resolution. He received his master and bachelor degrees in computer science from Carleton University. Previously, he worked as a graphic designer.
Forest Anderson is a fourth-year undergraduate student at Carleton University, majoring in computer science. He is interested in image processing, game development, and computer security.
Ehren Choy is a software developer at Ultra Electronics. He received his bachelor degree of software engineering from the University of Waterloo, and his master degree of computer science from Carleton University.
David Mould received his Ph.D. degree in computer graphics from the University of Toronto in 2002. Prior to this, he earned his B.Sc. degree in combined physics and computer science from the University of British Columbia. He was a faculty member at the University of Saskatchewan for six years, and is presently a professor at Carleton University, where he co-directs the Graphics, Imaging, and Games Lab in the School of Computer Science. Dr. Mould’s research interests include game design, non-photorealistic rendering, and procedural natural phenomena.
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Doyle, L., Anderson, F., Choy, E. et al. Automated pebble mosaic stylization of images. Comp. Visual Media 5, 33–44 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-019-0129-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-019-0129-0