A randomized iterative improvement algorithm for photomosaic generation

A photomosaic is an image assembled from smaller images called tiles. When a photomosaic is viewed from a distance, it resembles a desired target image. The process of photomosaic generation can be viewed as an optimization problem, where a set of tiles needs to be arranged to resemble a target image. We impose a constraint on the number of times a tile image can be repeated in a photomosaic. A randomized iterative improvement algorithm is used to generate photomosaics and the intermediate results are used to produce interesting animations. We show that the proposed technique is more efficient than genetic algorithm.