81–90 of 92 posts
If you averaged over all those sets, would the resulting blobby heatmap resemble the original word in a legible form? Or something else?
What (if anything) is this saying about the quality of the OCR process? Especially since none of these seem human readable.
I'm not bothered by it any more than I'm bothered by our brains' propensity for seeing faces where there aren't any.
Not strictly related, but reminded me of the exercise in genetic programming by Roger Alsing: http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolut... It's a rather cool attempt to draw the Mona Lisa using random, semi-transparent polygons
I did this recently, the results were surprisingly good! https://github.com/darkFunction/PolygonPainter Edit: Roger Alsing's implementation was a single entity population (mutated then reverted if the mutation was no good). I copied this approach in my first implementation, but found that much better results could be achieved with a breeding population of genes.
Ohhh, interesting, thanks for posting this! I just started playing around with this myself a few days ago in Javascript (it has no UI so no link yet, but I uploaded some samples [0]), and it also uses the original simple approach. I wondered about an "actual" gene pool and cross-breeding, but shyed away from the additional effort for uncertain benefit... so this helps, greatly :)
One thing I intend to try is to get the fittest (in terms of likeness to target image), and then calculate the fitness of the other genomes by taking the difference (in terms of variables that determine the shapes) to that "champion". I see you take the two most fittest as is, maybe this could be useful for picking the second one?
Also, when the Mona Lisa thing was posted on HN, someone suggested marking areas of the target image as "more important", to maybe make facial features etc. more recognizable. I'll also see if making such a mask automatically, e.g. influenced by contrast, helps any.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did this recently, the results were surprisingly good! https://github.com/darkFunction/PolygonPainter Edit: Roger Alsing's implementation was a single entity population (mutated then reverted if the mutation was no good). I copied this approach in my first implementation, but found that much better results could be achieved with a breeding population of genes.
> I copied this approach in my first implementation, but found that much better results could be achieved with a breeding population of genes. Ohhh, interesting, thanks for posting this! I just started playing around with this myself a few days ago in Javascript (it has no UI so no link yet, but I uploaded some samples [0]), and it also uses the original simple approach. I wondered about an "actual" gene pool and cro…
Yep, we take the two most fittest unchanged, and breed the rest randomly along a non-uniform distribution tending towards the top.
> Also, when the Mona Lisa thing was posted on HN, someone suggested marking areas of the target image as "more important", to maybe make facial features etc. more recognizable.
This is a really good idea and would definitely make a difference. In my penguin example, with too few polys, sometimes we reach a local maxima before the eyes (small details) look any good. I combatted this somewhat by encouraging new polys to be (a) small and (b) regular. But I like the idea of a more guided approach.
There's an awesome javascript example you might find helpful: http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/evolve/
Edit: Your images look amazing. How do you make the vector shapes?
I was thinking about this: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.html
I wonder if it also works for voice synthesis.
I can't believe OCR has not been solved yet. The only one even close is OmniPage.
This could be a cool way to visually "encrypt" messages. They're readable, but only by the correct tool. I wonder how these squiggles might be creatively arranged steganographicly in an image and still be "read" by the OCR tool.
This is a good idea! The problem with these squiggles is that they look abnormal and would draw attention. It would be interesting if these can be tweaked somehow so that they are still bot readable but can also be interpreted as patterns by humans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I copied this approach in my first implementation, but found that much better results could be achieved with a breeding population of genes. Ohhh, interesting, thanks for posting this! I just started playing around with this myself a few days ago in Javascript (it has no UI so no link yet, but I uploaded some samples [0]), and it also uses the original simple approach. I wondered about an "actual" gene pool and cro…
> I see you take the two most fittest as is, maybe this could be useful for picking the second one? Yep, we take the two most fittest unchanged, and breed the rest randomly along a non-uniform distribution tending towards the top. > Also, when the Mona Lisa thing was posted on HN, someone suggested marking areas of the target image as "more important", to maybe make facial features etc. more recognizable. This is a r…
Thanks! I just use what the HTML canvas has to offer: circles, n-gons, and n-gons made of bezier curves. Those can get drawn both filled and as outline, which in turn aren't drawn with plain colors, but gradients made of 3 HSLA colors (alpha ranges from 0.05 to 0.85, to make sure everything matters at least a bit and doesn't just get covered up or disappear), with the position of the middle color stop, as well as the coordinates that define the gradient direction, being variable.
The linewidth is variable, and it can also use dashed lines with a randomized pattern, which looks funky but I haven't gotten a good result with it yet. Another thing I'll do is add allowing picking a random compositing mode (and in the spirit of the expedition, do that for both fill and outline), but then it will be too unpredictable to look like being made of shapes, I expect.
The background also has a gradient consisting of no less than 6 colors, with 4 variable color stops.. what can I say, I like enums and copy and paste haha. Though of course adding more degrees of freedom nilly-willy might not be the best idea.. I have to improve the whole evolution/mutation stuff a lot first, and then I intend to throw just about anything at it I can find, at least as an option. Right now I added words, though that doesn't seem very promising. But having one basic common function to setup fill and outline gradients for any and all shapes I might come up with makes experimenting with this a breeze.
I kind of feel I should be doing this with WebGL, but then I wouldn't have all those convenient drawing functions.. but still, whenever WebGL 2.0 comes (which will make a lot of compute-ish things a lot easier AFAIK), I want to do at least a polgon/circle/bitmaps thing with it, because I feel a speedup factor of a gazillion might just make up for that :)