Irregular pebble mosaics with sub-pebble detail

Abstract

Pebble mosaics convey images through an irregular tiling of rounded pebbles. Past work used relatively uniform tile sizes. We show how to create detailed representations of input photographs in a pebble mosaic style; we first create pebble shapes through a variant of k-means, then compute sub-pebble detail with textured, two-tone pebbles. We use a custom distance function to ensure that pebble sizes adapt to local detail and orient to local feature directions, for an overall effect of high fidelity to the input photograph despite the constraints of the pebble style.