Artificial mosaics

Art often provides valuable hints for technological innovations especially in the field of Image Processing and Computer Graphics. In this paper we present a method to transform a raster input image into a good quality mosaic: an “artificial mosaic”. The creation of mosaics of artistic quality is challenging because the tiles that compose a mosaic, typically small polygons, must be packed tightly and yet must follow and emphasize orientations chosen by the artist. The proposed method can reproduce the colors of the original image and emphasize relevant boundaries by placing tiles along their direction. No user intervention is needed to detect the boundaries: they are automatically detected using a simple but effective image processing technique. Several examples reported in the paper show how the right mixture of mathematical tools together with century proved ideas from mosaicists may lead to impressive results.