Open source (fast) photomosaic software?

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Tue Jun 20, 2006 9:52 pm

I know some of the regulars here know a thing or two about image software and software development, so i figured i'd ask here first before going elseware (especially since this is for a video).

I'm looking for a decent piece of photomosaic software or something i can work on the algorythm of. I need to be able to produce something on the order of a 50x50 image or larger with 640x480 images (the export will therefore be giant) and I need to be able to produce over 200 of them in less than a month of total processing time (the last time i tried something like this, one export took around 20 hours i think).

If the software doesn't yet exist, i'm fine with trying to do it on my own. I figure I can save time by utilizing the content of previous frames as a startign point to match subsequent frames.

So, is there anything out there that could possibly do this quickly? Any Advice or suggestions anyoen could offer?

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Thu Jun 22, 2006 5:37 pm

Now that i think about it more, the image matching took less time than the "outputting" of the result, so a faster algorythm on that end may not speed things up too much (although the image library for the first time i attempted this was only around 15,000 images while this one will most likely be upwards of 200,000. If I could get my server working on this it may not be that big of an issue (except for the power drain that 2 800W power supplies would create), but i can't even I/O with the thing o.o;;

Does noone know anything about this kind of thing?

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Thu Jun 22, 2006 6:27 pm

My suggestion is to see what parts you will need to show up close, and what parts wont need to be seen up close. For example if you start zoomed in fully on a single image, and then you simply zoom out revealing thousands of other images around it, then the first image and perhaps a few around it are really the only ones that will be seen at full size.

You can exploit this fact by making a few different mosiacs (all with the same image arrangement, of course). Have one for when its fully zoomed out. You might need to make this only 3-4 times the resolution of your video. For example, if your video is 640x480, then this mosaic might have a resolution of 2560x1920 (rather than keeping each pic at full resolution and hopelessly trying to output an image thats something like 1024000x768000). Now, have another one, where the individual pics are a higher resolution, but it doesnt extend as far as the other did. Basically a higher resolution, cropped version of the first mosaic. Then group together the center images at their full resolution. Then you composite or swap out the different images throughout the animation as needed.

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Thu Jun 22, 2006 6:31 pm

That's not a bad idea. Thanks.

You wouldn't happen to have any recomendations on the software though, would you? I can't seem to find anything decent. What I used last time I tried something like this ran on my rommate's Mac while I was editing on my laptop.

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Thu Jun 22, 2006 6:46 pm

http://www.andreaplanet.com/andreamosaic/ <-- Not open by any means, but it seems to be ok.

http://jimage-mosaic.sourceforge.net/ <-- Site is borked, but content seems to be intact.

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Thu Jun 22, 2006 7:11 pm

Ohh. That first one seems quite nice. And according to some info on their forums, there's a way to join multiple images into larger ones as well.

Thanks for the help, i'll be sure to try this out when I get a chance to on my days off. (I still need to rip 2 more discs, burn 10 more DVDs worth of Vobs for backups, and clip through about 50 episodes of footage before I can worry about any effect work. I'd also love to get my server up and running on something like photo archiving. Something that doesn't require me to actually be there - so I can multi task.)

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Mon Jun 26, 2006 6:33 pm

UPDATE:

Andrea mosaic works well, except for the little insistance that all source images have to be JPEGs. o.o;; Also, there seems to be a memory leak issue when exporting sometimes. This should work then.

@ zarxrax: For the whole "making a second image for the images around the zoomed frame" idea - I'm thinking problems may arise in creating that second mosaic. If I throw a cropped section into the app I may get different images, and if i try to pase it together in photoshop i'm going to have issues lining all the images up the the same specs as the app... although I think photosop is the way to go with this one.

Finding the spicific images used in the base mosaic for the zoom may be a hastle since i'm going to have close to 100.000 images.

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Mon Jun 26, 2006 6:54 pm

Well, I don't know what kind of software you are planning to use to do anything with this image that you are making... but I can almost assure you that theres no way you can work with an image that size, if all the parts are at full resolution. You are gunna have to find some way to split it up. I ran into troubles creating images *significantly* smaller than what you are talking about. Photoshop cant even open images over 300,000x300,000 pixels.

Given 640 pixel width per panel, that allows you a width of less than 500 images. If you plan to work with it in something like After Effects, good luck getting it to even do that much!

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Mon Jun 26, 2006 10:36 pm

I plan on doing some zooming and panning on the photomosaic and having it "animated" in parts (i.e. photomosaic frame by frame) so I could use either Premiere or After Effects for the section.

An idea did just come to me over the last few hours though. I take the part of the base image (the one to be mosaiced) and I mosaic the section I want to zoom into in the full sized export, then i shrink that down to the more reasonibly sized one and save a copy and overlay it on the small sized full image if I need to. It should still fit perfectly.

On a related note, do you happen to know how big of an image you can import into AE (i have 5.0 if it matters).

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 8:16 am

I'm not entirely sure. I do know that when making my Starman video for NES project, i had a smaller mosaic than what you are talking about, I did the low res swap tricks, and i STILL was just barely able to render it on 1gb of ram. Ram is definately going to be your biggest consideration.

Even if you work with a highly compressed image, the application works with a decompressed version internally. It should need about 1mb of ram per 640x480 pixel block...