Afghan Girl from Flickr
I have made a tool, that indexes Flickr Creative Commons photos and performs some mathematical analysis on same. The results are stored in a database.
It then takes an input image, slices it up into tiles and matches these tiles with the closet image in the database. Due to the nature of the analysis done up front, large tiles can be used rather than individual pixels.
The entropy of the tiles is much greater than individual pixels, this yields a more realistic image in a smaller size than matching pixels to images.
McCurry’s Afghani Girl made from 2052 photos from Flickr.
A Rainbow, no repeating tiles.
An Elephant (with repeating tiles)
I find in many cases the resulting image is actually more interesting than the original, especially when tiles are not repeated.
If you send me a photo, I’ll do my best to create an image for you.
Those are just amazing, Afghan girl was done so well. Are you going to release the program? Also I know of a program that does this, it’s called Avid for XP and Linux, it’s a little hard to find but it’s pretty good – it just needs a huge directory of images.