Evolutionary Art Using the Fly Algorithm

Abstract

This study is about Evolutionary art such as digital mosaics. The most common techniques to generate a digital mosaic effect heavily rely on Centroidal Voronoi diagrams. Our method generates artistic images as an optimisation problem without the introduction of any a priori knowledge or constraint other than the input image. We adapt a cooperative co-evolution strategy based on the Parisian evolution approach, the Fly algorithm, to produce artistic visual effects from an input image (e.g. a photograph). The primary usage of the Fly algorithm is in computer vision, especially stereo-vision in robotics. It has also been used in image reconstruction for tomography. Until now the individuals correspond to simplistic primitives: Infinitely small 3-D points. In this paper, the individuals have a much more complex representation and represent tiles in a mosaic. They have their own position, size, colour, and rotation angle. We take advantage of graphics processing units (GPUs) to generate the images using the modern OpenGL Shading Language. Different types of tiles are implemented, some with transparency, to generate different visual effects, such as digital mosaic and spray paint. A user study has been conducted to evaluate some of our results. We also compare results with those obtained with GIMP, an open-source software for image manipulation.