Cube Me

Photo mosaics can be funny. A large "me" made of thousands of small "mini me's" :-)

Dirk's birthday

TOnight was Dirk's birthday, a good friend of mine who studies design. We had a nice party with old friends from Darmstadt.
I got inspired to do a cubist portrait of Dirk, but I did not have a photo of him with quality good enough to print, so I could not bring him the present in time.( i was also totally tired today, first several hours of final diplomthesis revisions and then 3 hours of aerobics and volleyball)

But maybe some other time. At least I got ideas for a cool new modification of cubism with classical photomocaics software
The result is here, Dirk liked the idead to make a photo collage of him in cubist style. I will give myself some time to make something really good, the first result is here

Cubism Improvements

I improved my algorithm in 2 small ways:
-automatic blurring of region borders
-more flexible window cropping

Cubism Caricatures

I have played some more with my Java cubism algorithm.
It can be summed in several steps:
-create a hexagonal grid
-split the hexagons in 3 parallelograms to simulate 3d cubes
-assugn to each hexagon a cut from the original photo image
-calculate the cut size according to the image content of the photo, e.g. eyes are an important visual element and should be repeated more
-from each quadratic cut get three deformed subshapes to create 3d cube illusion

In this way, a single input picture gives illusion of multiple angles, eyes become facetous, etc. , all one needs is my java program, an input photo, and a mask with important regions. One may manually choose eyes, or use a computer vision algorithm to do this automatically, or use any other image to superimpose, e,g, the photo of a famous person works nicely with a caricature of the same person :-)

I wondered wheteher it may be interesting to create a photo gallery of caricatures of politicians with my algoritm