Metapixel - A Photomosaic Generator

What is it?

Metapixel is a program for generating photomosaics. It can generate classical photomosaics, in which the source image is viewed as a matrix of equally sized rectangles for each of which a matching image is substitued, as well as collage-style photomosaics, in which rectangular parts of the source image at arbitrary positions (i.e. not aligned to a matrix) are substituted by matching images.

Examples

Features

• Metapixel generates not only classical mosaics but also collage-style photomosaics (see examples).
• The matching algorithms match not only color but also form.
• Metapixel is fast. It takes about 75 seconds to generate a classical photomosaic for a 2048x2432 image with constituent images of size 64x64 and a database of slightly more than 11000 images on my not-so-fast Alpha. Most of this time is spent loading and saving images.
• Metapixel can generate classical mosaics which contain at most one copy of each constituent image. Alternatively, Metapixel can be instructed to honor a minimum distance between two occurrences of the same image in classical photomosaics.
• Metapixel has a cheat option which overlays the photomosaic with the original image using a user-specified percentage. Small percentages yield noticable improvements but are innocent enough so as not to be noticed without close inspection.
• Metapixel is a command-line program and thus scriptable.

News

12-10-2006 Released version 1.0.2.

Several bugfixes and GIF reading and JPEG writing support.

02-20-2006 Released version 1.0.1.

Several bugfixes and some improvements to sizesort.

08-05-2005 Released version 1.0.0.

Bugfixes.

10-04-2004 Released version 0.11.

Metapixel can now take default values for its settings from a configuration file in the user's home directory (".metapixelrc"). The tables files must now always be in the directory where the small images reside, and that directory is now called a "library". Several bugfixes.

09-28-2004 Released version 0.10.

Can enforce a minimum image distance for collages. The prepare script can traverse directories recursively (thanks to Jake Di Toro). A rudimentary manual page is included (thanks to Chris Vanden Berghe). Speed improvements for reading the tables file. Several other small changes and bugfixes.

05-05-2004 Released version 0.9.

Fixes a bug that prevented the global search mode to work on non-square images. Adds a utility to sort images by size or aspect ratio. Got rid of libzoom, so Metapixel's license is now standard GPL.

01-15-2004 Released version 0.8.

Introduces a new search method which guarantees that no small image is used more than once in a mosaic. A new feature called "antimosaic" has been addes which is probably useless. Metapixel can now write the layout of a mosaic to a text file and read that file again to reproduce the mosaic. Compiles on MacOS X with Fink.

01-21-2000 Released version 0.7.

Memory requirements for creating classical photomosaics have been lowered tremendously in this version. Also, this version features a new option for scaling the input image (thanks to Osku Salerma).

01-15-2000 Released version 0.6.

This version features a new image matching metric which is actually an implementation of a trivial distance metric: the constituent image to be compared to and the subimage to be compared are both scaled to a size of 5x5 pixels and the sum of the distances of their pixels is used as the score, with lower scores meaning a better match.

01-09-2000 Released version 0.5.

01-06-2000 Released version 0.4.

01-04-2000 Released version 0.3.

01-03-2000 Released version 0.2.

12-29-1999 Released version 0.1.

Download

Source: metapixel-1.0.2.tar.gz

Source RPM: metapixel-1.0.2-1.src.rpm
FC6 i386 RPM: metapixel-1.0.2-1.i386.rpm
FC6 x86_64 RPM: metapixel-1.0.2-1.x86_64.rpm

Old releases

Legal Conditions

Metapixel is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence.

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