Stick with me (no pun intended) through this meandering message; I promise I'll bring this back to Zentherstick.

Bob Bosch, one of my best friends from college, is a Math professor at Oberlin. For the last 10 years, he has devoted much of his research time and attention to the most serious questions of our day - such as how to arrange the dominoes from several complete sets in the best way to match some photographic image.

One of his more recent areas of explorations is in the transformation of a grayscale image to a series of discrete black points on a white plane, along with the line segments that trace out the shortest tour that visits each of the dots exactly once. The computational work behind that last part (known by math folks as the "Traveling Salesman Problem") is particularly nasty - actually, it's straightforward, but when there are tens of thousands of dots, exact solutions can literally take years of CPU time; fortunately, there are good heuristic techniques that give nearly optimal solutions in a fraction of the time required for an exact solution.

I've been experimenting with some of his research, building implementations of portions of the technique in Java. Some of this was for a class I taught this semester, but some is speculative work in advance of a possible book collaboration he and I might do. Anyway, some photos are well-suited to this kind of processing, and some are not. I have one of Kent (from the Winter Storm Warning photos) and one of Matt (from the photo gallery on this site) that were good samples to work with. Kent's was a lot easier, since the background was very light; but the more subtle contrasts in Matt's photo also made for an interesting experiment.

So I figured I'd upload these images here, so you guys can see what the hell I'm babbling on about.

Post edited by: nickbenn, at: 2006/05/22 20:43

Here's the one of Kent:

Post edited by: nickbenn, at: 2006/05/22 20:56

And the one of Matt:

Holy shiat Nick that is F'n cool!

Do me do me do me....

Can I give you a pic to process?

Way cool.

Sure thing, Tony.

In fact, I tried to find a pic of you in the gallery which would work well for this, but didn't see one at first glance. Basically, pics that work best have a light background, and not many small details (e.g. guitar frets/strings, Zendrum pads, etc. are not handled well with this method)

By the way, Bob has also invented a color version of this technique, which is really trippy - basically, there are separate, interweaving loops for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Bob and I have discussed - and I really want to make it happen - incorporating either the grayscale or color techniques into CD artwork projects; I suspect that Naked April is probably not the right place for it (of course, I could be wrong), but Zentherstick, Spazz, or Side B (the current working name for the mutation of Naked April which plays & writes music more in the vein of Rytting/Bennett) might be good candidates.

Post edited by: nickbenn, at: 2006/05/24 11:34

Let me dig around and find an image that might work well for you.

How long does it take for the process to complete? The matt pic looks like it could have taken a while.

Wonder if you could turn that into a photoshop filter?