Show HN: ASCII Art with Overstrike • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: ASCII Art with Overstrike

#11

Post by inguz » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

symisc_devel wrote: post #7

https://art.pixlab.io does something similar using ML oriented approach (decision tree).

Very interesting - thanks for the link. (This is exactly what I hoped HN would show me!)

Several interesting things there. The use of Structured Similarity Index (SSIM) is probably better/faster than the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) that my project uses. And then, at runtime, I'm still doing a brute-force match (which is really slow) -- clearly there are big performance gains to be made by training a classifier.

Their results are really good!

Re: Show HN: ASCII Art with Overstrike

#12

Post by inguz » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 1:22 PM UTC

nebgnahz wrote: post #5

Related and fun: https://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~ttwong/papers/asciiart/asciiart...

Very very cool. I love their approach of looking for similarity metrics that are less sensitive to local misalignment, and this is something I'me very interested in exploring in the future.

I'm not completely convinced by their distinction between "tone-based" and "structure-based", though. When they talk about structure, it seems to primarily mean 'edges'. Instead maybe a more useful distinction would be between "local optimization" (at the level of a single printed character), and optimizing "globally" or over a wider area of the image, and so allowing an iterative optimizer to find a really compact representation.

Re: Show HN: ASCII Art with Overstrike

#13

Post by inguz » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 1:41 PM UTC

cryptonector wrote: post #8

Overstrike makes ASCII the first multi-byte encoding of an internationalized character set (for the Latin family of scripts anyways). I'm not kidding. The ASCII character set was actually designed to permit overstriking to yield a variety of characters such as, e.g., á. But of course, this follows from the fact that the typefaces used in typewriters were so designed. Historically that is how people wrote chara…

There's a text-printer 'Cedilla' (https://www.irif.fr/~jch/software/cedilla/) that uses this composition across large parts of Unicode - to quite good effect it seems.

The Teletype doesn't do backspace (!) but can do carriage-return... so e.g. to print "Björk" , the text is: BJORK(CR)(space)(space)(quote). I have a Teensy microcontroller that already handles some ANSI-escape characters, and implements the 'backspace' ^[[D this way (https://github.com/hughpyle/ASR33/blob/master/firmware/ansi_...). Next on the backlog is "bold", using a similar strategy. Fun times :)

Re: Show HN: ASCII Art with Overstrike

#14

Post by dukoid » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 1:43 PM UTC

333c wrote: post #4

The "sub-character pixels" are such a clever idea! Nice work.

Shameless plug: Done here for displaying images in modern terminals: https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer

I was wondering if I should try this for a more complete set of unicode characters (opposed to just block graphics), but I'd need find a good way to match slightly off positioning. Perhaps just register the same character multiple times, shifted by one px in each direction?

Re: Show HN: ASCII Art with Overstrike

#15

Post by inguz » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

dukoid wrote: post #14

333c wrote: post #4

The "sub-character pixels" are such a clever idea! Nice work.

Shameless plug: Done here for displaying images in modern terminals: https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer I was wondering if I should try this for a more complete set of unicode characters (opposed to just block graphics), but I'd need find a good way to match slightly off positioning. Perhaps just register the same character multiple times, shifted by one px in each direction?

Nice!

Re: Show HN: ASCII Art with Overstrike

#16

Post by inguz » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 2:57 AM UTC

inguz wrote: post #11

symisc_devel wrote: post #7

https://art.pixlab.io does something similar using ML oriented approach (decision tree).

Very interesting - thanks for the link. (This is exactly what I hoped HN would show me!) Several interesting things there. The use of Structured Similarity Index (SSIM) is probably better/faster than the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) that my project uses. And then, at runtime, I'm still doing a brute-force match (which is really slow) -- clearly there are big performance gains to be made by training a classif…

After some more investigation... their paper is interesting. But: it's $25 to download their model file, and the trainer code and training dataset aren't published. Oh well.

Re: Show HN: ASCII Art with Overstrike

#17

Post by inguz » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 3:33 AM UTC

inguz wrote: post #12

nebgnahz wrote: post #5

Related and fun: https://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~ttwong/papers/asciiart/asciiart...

Very very cool. I love their approach of looking for similarity metrics that are less sensitive to local misalignment, and this is something I'me very interested in exploring in the future. I'm not completely convinced by their distinction between "tone-based" and "structure-based", though. When they talk about structure, it seems to primarily mean 'edges'. Instead maybe a more useful distinction would be between "lo…

A little more digging turned up a recent paper that uses Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) along with neural-network training: http://www.jsoftware.us/vol13/355-SE3002.pdf