Artificial mosaics with irregular tiles based on gradient vector flow

Abstract

Artificial mosaics can be generated making use of computational processes devoted to reproduce different artistic styles and related issues. One of the most challenging field is the generation of an artificial mosaic reproducing some ancient and well known techniques starting from any input image. In this paper we propose a mosaic generation approach based on gradient vector flow (GVF) properly integrated with a set of tile cutting heuristics. The various involved cutting strategies, namely subtractive and shared cuts, have been evaluated according to aesthetic criteria. Several tests and comparisons with a state-of-the-art method confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.