The program would take each person or object, outline them and formulate tessellated pieces of the group that will interlock with all the other images to create a collage with few or no empty spaces when the puzzle is all fit together.

Some manipulation of the picture would be necessary, but you'd basically have each piece be an individual person, group of people, object or scene. Be an interesting programming challenge.
-- doctorremulac3, Apr 13 2023

You'd get this only with the pieces being pictures from your photo collection. https://www.worthpo...osaic-ii-1796035877
Manipulation to get them as close together as possible might be adjustable. [doctorremulac3, Apr 13 2023]

The subject separation feature is already here. https://www.youtube...watch?v=caJ4VICuzwg
Just a matter of figuring out how to fit them together. [doctorremulac3, Apr 14 2023]

Kind of a fun video. https://www.google....9MOHCkPIPw-OssAQ_35
[doctorremulac3, Apr 14 2023]

This would be a difficult piece of software to write. And if you tried handing it over to AI, you *might* find that there aren't enough Escher drawings of the right kind to use as training data - not least because it goes a step beyond what Escher did.

OTOH, that might make it an interesting challenge for someone in the AI field.
-- pertinax, Apr 13 2023


Actually I've done a couple of these in my youth, by hand obviously. There's a pretty straightforward explanation of how to do it in this Escher book I got as a kid. It really is just straight up geometry.

For starters, everything's a square. Now put a bump on one and a corresponding dent someplace else. Each figure would be analized as to what it has in the way of bumps and dents and put into a list. Keep in mind, pictures can be mirror imaged tweaked as necessary.

I couldn't do it but I assume somebody could.
-- doctorremulac3, Apr 13 2023


Bear in mind that software still struggles a bit with "Which of these pictures has a traffic light in it?"
-- pertinax, Apr 14 2023


I hear ya, but this would just be taking that new thing on the iPhone where you hold it down and it knows what picture is the person and eliminates the background. That would be a large part of this.

Then the next step is analyzing those "holes" and "bumps" and figuring how much you'd have to nudge them or leave in a little of that background to get them fit together.

You know, an easy thing to do might be to have the camera guide you into how to pose so the pieces could be fit together.
-- doctorremulac3, Apr 14 2023


This has been done already. At Ford we did a bunch of employee photos to do a huge picture of the Fusion when it hit the market. I had a scaled down pic of it on my fridge.

I also have a JiGaZo puzzle set which is a different sort of idea; you feed the software a picture to duplicate and it tells you what pieces to put where from its set of square pieces.
-- RayfordSteele, Apr 14 2023


And the pictures are tessellated? That is, the piece is shaped like the person's outline and its arm fits seamlessly into a hole in another person's outline? (get your mind out of the gutter, you know what I mean)

Now to be clear, this isn't just taking a picture and turning it into a puzzle, it's automatically tessellating images so they fit together.
-- doctorremulac3, Apr 14 2023


Is there an AR puzzle solver app yet? It would let you look through your phones camera and highlight which piece goes where
-- Voice, Apr 15 2023



random, halfbakery