Decorative Photomosaics Respecting Human Visual Perception

Abstract

A photomosaic is an artistic representation of an image,which is achieved by partitioning the reference image into a rectangular grid of sections and replacing each section with a small photograph simulating its local color distribution.However, the grid type of partitioning usually reduces the visual quality of photomosaics because it does not account for the arrangement of the underlying features in the input image.In this paper, we enhance the photomosaics by fully respecting the associated perceptual saliency of the image.This is accomplished by adaptively placing seamlessly connected quadrilaterals so that they can be aligned with both the global color gradation and local image edges,together with the sophisticated assignment of small photographs based on the metric of image saliency.This simple modification allows us to significantly improve the decorative coloring of the final photomosaics while maximally preserving the original quality of the selected small photographs.