Conception

Programming as a design tool

This project was initiated in Golan Levin’s course The Interactive Image at Carnegie Mellon in the Fall of 2005. We spent most of the semester learning about Processing and fundamental concepts of graphics programming. Some assignments dealt with image analysis and direct manipulation of image pixels, something that I had never been able to do before when working in Flash.

One thing Golan stressed was that learning how to write code allows you to do things not possible with out of the box design applications. As a designer I work with images constantly to communicate information, emotion, and interaction cues. I had always considered programming something I did to make finished interactive works but I started to see how it could also be used to build my own design tools.

To get started with this line of thinking I knew that I needed to dig into image processing techniques. I chose to explore ways that the computer can “see” images and then try to cluster them by similarity. My goal was not to create a complete application or even a working tool but rather to challenge myself with an exercise that would get me started learning about image processing.

Description

Analyzing images in a Flickr group for similarity

For my final project I chose to work with images from the Flickr group Squared Circle, a moderated collection of circular objects formatted consistently in a square frame. These images worked well for my purposes because:

  • It’s a huge dataset, over 20,000 available images.
  • They are consistently formatted and sized.
  • An established visual theme emphasizes further similarities I am able to find.
  • They are licensed under a Creative Commons agreement that allows me to create derivative works.

Flickr orders images in this group by date posted or they can be grouped using textual tags that the photographer adds. I hoped that by looking at the actual content of the images I could provide another interesting way to browse this collection while learning about image processing.

 

Inspiration/Thanks

Credit where it’s due

I’d like to thank the following people/projects for inspiration, help, and code.