Jump to content

Photographic mosaic

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by J2thawiki (talk | contribs) at 13:02, 13 October 2006 (replaced example mosaic). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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

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].

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.

History

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.).
  • 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.
  • 1995 Robert Silvers creates a Photomosaic, and goes on to trademark the term Photomosaic and patent creation of Photomosaics in 1997.

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 6,137,498, Template:EP patent, Template:JP patent, Template:CA patent, Template:AU patent. 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 control the process of creating mosaics of photos, which explains the widespread use worldwide. His assertion that the "look and feel are protected by the patent, copyright, and other intellectual property laws of the United States and other major countries" is similarly non-viable.

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).

Photographic mosaic software

Freeware and OpenSource/FreeSoftware

Commercial

Photographic mosaic companies

References

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Photographic_mosaic&oldid=81201577"