MonaTweeta II
Originally uploaded by Quasimondo

Came across this interesting project today - the goal is to devise a scheme to compress an image so that it can be transmitted in a single tweet, which comprises a mere 140 characters - barely long enough to describe the four course meal you’re part way through consuming.

To illustrate the magnitude of the task at hand, that opening paragraph weighs in at about two tweets. Quasimondo’s solution utilises some neat tricks.

Firstly using Chinese characters increases the available storage as the set is larger than the standard western character set (which presumably enables anyone fluent in Cantonese to exchange essays over twitter).

The clever part as far as I’m concerned is the decoded image is generated using the Voronoi tessellation, which means each of the multi-sided shapes that make up the image can stored as a single point with x and y coordinates (plus a colour).

This enables large and potentially complex regions to be transmitted very efficiently. This does, however require the careful placing of points to generate salient shapes, whereupon the next clever idea is utilised. The points, or ’seeds’ are generated randomly at first and then mutated over many generations of a genetic algorithm to find the arrangement that best replicates the original image.

Click the thumbnail for a more complete description from the man himself.

MG

I am now on twitter so go and add me if you want to know more about what I am up to. I promise I will only post about photography projects, updates and interesting things I come across, not about what I’m eating for breakfast!

Anyone who’s seen my flickr stream and/or blog post knows I’m a big fan of the Orbis ring flash adaptor. They recently held a competition and although I didn’t win I was pleased be in the top 10 - considering the high standard of photos selected! My image (which accompanies this post) along with the other finalists & winner have been added to the Orbis samples gallery here.

MG