Photomosaic Algorithm with Adaptive Tilting and Block Matching

Mosaic is to make a big image by gathering lots of small materials having various colors. With advance of digital imaging techniques, photomosaic techniques using photos are widely used. In this paper, we presents an automatic photomosaic algorithm based on adaptive tiling and block matching. The proposed algorithm is composed of two processes: photo database generation and photomosaic generation. Photo database is a set of photos (or tiles) used for mosaic, where a tile is divided into regions and the average RGB value of each region is the feature of the tile. Photomosaic generation is composed of 4 steps: feature extraction, adaptive tiling, block matching, and intensity adjustment. In feature extraction, the feature of each block is calculated after the image is splitted into the preset size of blocks. In adaptive tiling, the blocks having similar similarities are merged. Then, the blocks are compared with tiles in photo database by comparing euclidean distance as a similarity measure in block matching. Finally, in intensity adjustment, the intensity of the matched tile is replaced as that of the block to increase the similarity between the tile and the block. Also, a tile redundancy minimization scheme of adjacent blocks is applied to enhance the quality of mosaic photos. In comparison with Andrea mosaic software, the proposed algorithm outperforms in quantitative and qualitative analysis.