Photo Mosaic Generation Algorithm Using the DCT Hash

With the current high distribution rate of smart devices and the recent development of computing technology, user interest in multimedia, such as photos, videos, and so on, has rapidly increased, which is a departure from the simple pattern of information retrieval. Because of these increasing interests, image processing techniques, which generate and process images for diverse applications, are being developed. In entertainment recently, there are some techniques that present a celebrity's image as a mosaic comprising many small images. In addition, studies into the mosaic technique are actively conducted. However, conventional mosaic techniques result in a long processing time as the number of database images increases, because they compare the images in the databases sequentially. Therefore, to increase search efficiency, this paper proposes an algorithm to generate a mosaic image using a discrete cosine transform (DCT) hash. The proposed photo mosaic-generation algorithm is composed of database creation and mosaic image generation. In database creation, it first segments images into blocks with a predefined size. And then, it computes and stores a DCT hash set for each segmented block. In mosaic generation, it efficiently searches for the most similar blocks in the database via DCT hash for every block of the input image, and then it generates the final mosaic. With diverse experimental results, the proposed photo mosaic-creation algorithm can effectively generate a mosaic, regardless of the various types of images and sizes.