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Image Processing

Design & Visualization

The Incredible Convenience of Mathematica Image Processing

It’s been possible since Version 6 of Mathematica to embed images directly into lines of code, allowing such stupid code tricks as expanding a polynomial of plots. But is this really good for anything? As with many extremely nifty technologies, this feature of Mathematica had to wait a while before the killer app for it was discovered. And that killer app is image processing. Mathematica 7 adds a suite of image processing functions from trivial to highly sophisticated. To apply them to images, you don’t need to use any form of import command or file name references. Just type the command you want to use, then drag and drop the image from your desktop or browser right into the input line.
Theodore Gray, Cofounder, Wolfram Research, Inc.; Founder, Touch Press
Design & Visualization

Making Photo Mosaics

You’ve probably seen examples of photo mosaics where each “tile” in the mosaic is a tiny photograph, selected so the overall brightness and color of the tiny photo averages out to the brightness and color needed for its position in the overall mosaic.

Following a suggestion by Ed Pegg, I suddenly found it impossible to imagine life without a photo mosaic of Dmitri Mendeleev, the principal inventor of the periodic table, made out of photographs of the elements.

It was convenient in this regard that I possess the world’s largest stock library of photographs of the chemical elements—about 2,000 photographs of roughly 1,550 different physical samples of the pure and applied elements—along with a photograph of Mendeleev and a bit of software called Mathematica. (You can see this library at periodictable.com; don’t forget to order a copy of my photo periodic table poster.)

You might think that creating photo mosaics is a standard task for which software, probably even free software, is available. And for all I know it is. But upon brief reflection I decided it would probably be faster and easier for me to write code to do this from scratch in Mathematica than it would be to find something to download and then figure out how to use it.

It turns out you can do a first pass at it with three lines of input.
Theodore Gray, Cofounder, Wolfram Research, Inc.; Founder, Touch Press
Design & Visualization

The Elements of Video Production in Mathematica

A little hobby of mine is collecting and photographing the chemical elements. I have them all (except those that break the laws of man or physics). This is the photographic periodic table poster I sell: My poster and related imagery can be seen in several TV shows, and most recently staff at the venerable NOVA science series emailed asking for permission to use my poster image in an upcoming show about metals. They wanted to pan and zoom over it, starting wide and then focusing down onto a few individual elements. I said, “Fine, but I have something I think you’ll like even better... How about a video where every one of those samples is rotating in place?” And here is that video. What does any of this have to do with Mathematica? That video, and the more complex ones below, are directly output from Mathematica without any processing in traditional video editing tools.
Theodore Gray, Cofounder, Wolfram Research, Inc.; Founder, Touch Press