A downloadable tool

1. What iz dat ?

Mosaïca is a free mosaic image generator tool. This java program allows you to build up mosaic images from a reference image and a set of smaller images. Mosaica is still in development, it will be available in September 2015.

2. How to use it ?

Simply! Download the .jar and launch it. You have to :

    • Browse to your reference image. Careful, the size of the output mosaic image will be the same as the reference image.
    • Browse to your image folder. All sub directories are visited. Any PNG and JPEG images will be considered as an constitutive image. In order to produce good mosaic image, you will need a lo(oo)ot of constitutive images. If you are not an image collector, see section 3.
    • Give a name to your output image. It will be generate at the root directory of the application.
    • Now, you can process the genetic algorithm. More details about them in section 4. A genetic algorithm method makes funnier images with more details than a straightforward algorithm but it is a very long process.

3. But... I have not so many images !

Don't panic, in the download links you can find a folder plenty of small images. Use this directory as the small image directory in order to build up your mosaic image.

All of this small image come from free databases for image processing and objects recognition. So, don't worry if you find some planes or fancy licence plates.

If you want to add you own images to the given images, just place this given folder inside your image folder.

4. How does it work ?

A genetic algorithm is a programming method that allows to find a solution (here, an image) of a specific problem (here, create a correct mosaic image from many images). The particularties a genetic algorithm is that solutions evolve in a pseudo-random way, the solutions are mostly not determinist.

I won't explain the implementation of genetic programming. Many blogs like this or wikipedia already explain it.

For the implementation, I have used Java language with the OpenCV library.

5. Contact

You can send me a message at val.tyr{at}hotmail.com

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