Building image mosaics: an application of content-based image retrieval

An image mosaic is an image made up of many other images. In this paper we investigate the automatic generation of such image mosaics, using content-based image retrieval as the underlying framework. Our first contribution is to describe and evaluate a few parameters that control the quality of the mosaic image. Our second contribution is the proposal of an (automatic) measure to assess the quality of the resulting images. Several examples of mosaics built in the context of this research can be found at http://db.cs.ualberta.ca/mosaicture.