String Art

Throughout the term I have been working on a program to create computer generated string art.  It was inspired by the art of Kim Kamens. Kamens creates amazing realistic representations of animals, people, etc with just the use of nails and string.

“L.B.” By Kim Kamens

“Eli” By Kim Kamens

A close up of the eye, amazing detail!

So my goal was to try to see if I could write an algorithm that could generate similar imagery. More details about my program (along with executable files and source code)  will be posted shortly.  For now I will just explain the basic idea.  Given a grayscale input image such as:

Generate nail placements.  From examining Kamen’s art, I noticed that nails are densely placed along the edges, or ‘feature lines’ of the image.  So I perform edge detection and place nails closely along the edges, and connect them with strings.  Next, nails are placed somewhat evenly around the rest of the image, and I run my algorithm that connects nails based on the intensity of the image surrounding the nail.  For instance, in areas of low intensity (dark gray-black), nails would have many connections, and the opposite holds for areas of high intensity. When a nail has many connections (many strings leaving the nail) it creates the appearance of dark area.

Here is an example output.  This is just a quick low-quality render.  The user can modify many parameters in the program to produce higher quality images.  Using a large output image helps create a more realistic image.  I will post more examples of output a bit later.

That’s all for now!