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Digital micrography

Published:25 July 2011Publication History

ABSTRACT

We present an algorithm for creating digital micrography images, or micrograms, a special type of calligrams created from minuscule text. These attractive text-art works successfully combine beautiful images with readable meaningful text. Traditional micrograms are created by highly skilled artists and involve a huge amount of tedious manual work. We aim to simplify this process by providing a computerized digital micrography design tool. The main challenge in creating digital micrograms is designing textual layouts that simultaneously convey the input image, are readable and appealing. To generate such layout we use the streamlines of singularity free, low curvature, smooth vector fields, especially designed for our needs. The vector fields are computed using a new approach which controls field properties via a priori boundary condition design that balances the different requirements we aim to satisfy. The optimal boundary conditions are computed using a graph-cut approach balancing local and global design considerations. The generated layouts are further processed to obtain the final micrograms. Our method automatically generates engaging, readable micrograms starting from a vector image and an input text while providing a variety of optional high-level controls to the user.

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  1. Digital micrography

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        • Published in

          cover image ACM Conferences
          SIGGRAPH '11: ACM SIGGRAPH 2011 papers
          August 2011
          869 pages
          ISBN:9781450309431
          DOI:10.1145/1964921

          Copyright © 2011 ACM

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          Publication History

          • Published: 25 July 2011

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          SIGGRAPH '11 Paper Acceptance Rate82of432submissions,19%Overall Acceptance Rate1,822of8,601submissions,21%

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