smerity / aail-art

Abstract Art Involving Lines (AAIL)

AAIL-Art

Abstract Art Involving Lines (AAIL)

Create art using computer science. This will initially be line diagrams using the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP).

For the initial version, only Prim's algorithm is used. Whilst this results in a Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) and not a TSP, the resulting images can still be pleasing. This implementation of Prim's algorithm is also O(n^2) and will not scale well for large inputs. For tuning, use the simplify command line option.

Finally, the solver allows for use of two different distance calculators: L1 and L2. L1 distance is commonly known as Manhattan distance and is the distance it'd take you to get from one point to another if you had to navigate via city blocks. L2 distance can be described as the distance 'as the crow flies'. Manhattan distance encourages horizontal and vertical lines which may serve a particular aesthetic aim.

Usage: aail [options] input_image output_image

Options:
  -h, --help   show this help message and exit
  -n SIMPLIFY  Simplification amount (retain 1/n vertices for MST)
  --l1         Enable L1 (abs(x) + abs(y)) distance calculation instead of L2
               (x**2 + y**2)

If you were crazy...

If you want to contribute to this pet project, some ideas include:

• Find the most common k colours and perform one MST / TSP per colour, combining them together to form the image
• Implement approximate TSP (non overlapping for aesthetics) so you can trace the image without taking your pen off the paper
• A C/Go/Java/Lua/PyPy/NumPy/GPGPU//... implementation of MST for improved speed on large data sets
• For the "I must make everything a ray tracer" idea: store the pixels in an octree so only a subset of pixels need to be considered instead of all N pixels