Photo rendering with swarms: From figurative to abstract pherogenic imaging

This paper describes the use of ant colony models for photographic rendering, that is, for the depiction or interpretation of photographic images. A description of a previously proposed ant-based edge detection method called pherographia is given in order to contextualize this paper's proposal. Then, the application of the KANTS algorithm to photo-rendering is introduced. KANTS is ant-based clustering algorithm described by a set of equations that model the local behavior of simple units (ants). These units represent data samples. When moving on a heterogeneous 2-dimensional lattice of vectors, global behavior emerges from the local interaction between the ants, which self-organize into clusters. In this paper, a data set consists of the RGB values of a digital (or digitalized) photograph. Two different approaches for the initialization of the environment are tested, each one resulting in radically different output images: when the environment is initialized with the RGB values of the same image that is used to generate the data set, the final result is very similar to the original photo; a random initialization of the environment leads to an abstract interpretation of the photo. The results are contextualized within previous swarm artworks by the authors.