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Computational Visual Media 2019, 5(1): 33-44 https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-019-0129-0
Research Article | Open Access | Issue | Published: 08 April 2019

Automated pebble mosaic stylization of images

Show Author's Information Lars Doyle1( ),  Forest Anderson1,  Ehren Choy1,  David Mould1
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
Keywords:
segmentation, non-photorealistic rendering, digital mosaics, image stylization, image processing
Cite this article:
Doyle L, Anderson F, Choy E, et al. Automated pebble mosaic stylization of images. Computational Visual Media, 2019, 5(1): 33-44. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-019-0129-0
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Abstract Full text About this article

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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About this article

Automated pebble mosaic stylization of images

Show Author's information Lars Doyle1( ), Forest Anderson1, Ehren Choy1, David Mould1
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

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.

Keywords: segmentation, non-photorealistic rendering, digital mosaics, image stylization, image processing

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Publication history
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Publication history

Revised: 21 December 2018
Accepted: 16 January 2019
Published: 08 April 2019
Issue date: March 2019

Copyright

© The Author(s) 2019

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 photo-graphers 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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