Photographic mosaic

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A photographic mosaic of a sea gull made from pictures of birds and other nature photos.
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A photographic mosaic of a sea gull made from pictures of birds and other nature photos.

In the field of photographic imaging, a photographic mosaic (also known under the term Photomosaic, a portmanteau of photo and mosaic, trademarked by Runaway Technology, Inc.) is a picture (usually a photograph) that has been divided into (usually equal sized) rectangular sections, each of which is replaced with another photograph of appropriate average color. When viewed at low magnifications, the individual pixels appear as the primary image, while close examination reveals that the image is in fact made up of many hundreds or thousands of smaller images. They are a computer created type of montage.

Originally, the term photomosaic referred to compound photographs created by stitching together a series of adjacent pictures of a scene. Space scientists have been assembling mosaics of this kind since at least as early as the Soviet Union space satellite missions to the moon in the late 1950s [1].

Contents

[edit] History

1993 Live from Bell Labs Event Poster
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1993 Live from Bell Labs Event Poster

Related to the manually created 9th century art of Micrography which utilises letters & symbols to create larger images. Leon Harmon of Bell Labs created images from symbols and letters in 1973 which led to the popularity of ASCII art in the 1970s and 1980s.

  • 1993 Joseph Francis, working for R/Greenberg Associates in Manhattan, is believed to be the inventor of the modern day computer generated colour image versions. His 'Live from Bell Labs' poster created in 1993 used computer themed tile photographs to create a mosaic of a face. He went on to create a mosaic for Animation Magazine in 1993 which was repeated in Wired Magazine (November 1994 p. 106). Francis has said, on his "History of Photo Mosaics" webpage, that his interest in developing these techniques further was in part stimulated by the work of artist Chuck Close.
  • 1994 Dave McKean creates an image for DC Comics, a mosaic of a face made from photos of faces. Although this is believed to be created manually using photoshop.
1994 JFK mosaic, Adam Finkelstein and Sandy Farrier
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1994 JFK mosaic, Adam Finkelstein and Sandy Farrier
  • 1994 Adam Finkelstein and Sandy Farrier, creates mosaic of JFK from parts of Marilyn Monroe picture. Result was displayed in the Xerox PARC Algorithmic Art Show in 1994.
  • 1994 Benetton: AIDS - Faces mosaic. Over one thousand young peoples' portraits from all over the word computer-processed spell out the word AIDS.
1995 Gioconda Sapiens, Domus museum, Spain
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1995 Gioconda Sapiens, Domus museum, Spain
  • 1995 The Gioconda Sapiens, a face with ten thousand faces, was presented to the public in April 1995 (Spain, Domus museum). This was the the first large photographic mosaic, using photographs of 10,062 people from 110 countries to make the Mona Lisa.
  • 1995 Robert Silvers creates a Photomosaic, and goes on to trademark the term Photomosaic and patent creation of Photomosaics in 1997.

[edit] Patents

Robert Silvers, a Master's student at MIT filed for a trademark on the term Photomosaic on September 3, 1996 (registered on August 12 2003) and later applied for a U.S. patent on the production of Photomosaics on January 2, 1997 which was granted in 2000. He then filed a European patent application on the process. He obtained U.S. Patent 6137498 , European patent 0852363, Japanese Patent 10269353, Canadian Patent 2226059, Australian Patent AU723815B. He is quoted as saying: "By being granted this patent in the United States and other countries, we can protect our proprietary innovations and continue to make unique artwork."

Contrary to his claims however, his patent does not completely control the process of creating mosaics of photos. There are a number of commercial companies that create mosaics with photos and presumably none of them infringe on Silver's particular process.

There is an additional controversy related to his European patent, due to Article 52(2)(c) of the European Patent Convention (EPC) which provided that "programs for computers" are not regarded as patentable inventions [2]. Claim 15 of EP852363 mentions "(...) a computer workstation that executes mosaic generation software". (See also Software patents under the EPC).

[edit] See also

[edit] Photographic mosaic software

Freeware and OpenSource/FreeSoftware


Commercial


[edit] References

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