This is a project was intended to be a Christmas gift for my parents. The idea was to build a photo mosaic (image made from other images)
using family related photos. The most difficult part turned out to be compiling enough
images to make a decent looking mosaic without re-using images too many times. I had a semi-large digital collection of family photos, though I scanned a few hundred
older images as well. An interesting aspect of this project (that looking back on it seems blatantly obvious) was that using a "greedy" approach when choosing
images for a sub-portion of the input image will not work well. When this is done images are often re-used all over and makes the resulting mosaic look very patterned. To
aleviate this issue I ended up using a weighting scheme when computing the best match for a sub-region of the input image. Each time an image was used, a small penalty was
assesed to using the image again in the future. Two sample mosaics and their source images are shown below.
Sample Output 2
