Gnarly image manipulation

For CS 314H, our first project involves programming routines to perform visual transformations for images. While I can’t share any of the code, I will present a few of my favorite examples:

A motorcycle with a single Gaussian blur and edge detector applied (middle). After another edge detection pass and some smoothing/Gaussian blurs, the outline on the right emerged. Source image courtesy of Harley-Davidson.

Of course, often times our greatest feats are the results of our most egregious blunders:

Affine identity transform... unless?

I wanted to try and replicate the famous Obama Hope poster, but I found an entire paper from the University of Washington on the subject, so I settled for a posterized flower:

A posterized flower. Source image courtesy of Arthur Rachbauer

Here is yet another classic edge detection nightmare (diagonal lines everywhere), surprisingly overcome by a simple Gaussian filter and some downsampling:

Downsampling, Gaussian blur and edge detector applied to a building. Source image courtesy Stephan Schmid.