Photomosaic

From Free net encyclopedia

In the field of photographic imaging, a photomosaic 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 colour. 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. Photomosaics are a computer created type of montage. The word photomosaic is a portmanteau of photo and mosaic.

1 History
2 Patents
3 Photomosaic software
4 Photomosaic companies
5 References

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History

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 photomosaic of a face. He went on to create a photomosaic 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 photomosaic of a face made from faces. Although this is believed to be created manually using photoshop.

1995 Robert Silvers creates a photomosaic, and goes on to patent creation of photomosaics in 1997.

Image:Photo-mosaic-Joseph-Francis.jpg

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Patents

Robert Silvers, a Master's student at MIT obtained a trademark on the term photomosaic in 1995 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 Template:US patent, Europe patent EP0852363 [1], Japanese patent 3,029,413 [2] [3], Canadian patent 2,226,059 [4], Australian patent 723,815. 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 photomosaics, which explains the widespread use of photomosaics 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 [5]. Claim 15 of EP852363 mentions "(...) a computer workstation that executes mosaic generation software". (See also Software patents under the EPC).

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