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Spraying Digital Graffiti

May 30, 2024

Background

My partner has an upcoming show she's promoting. She has a couple of
nice pictures with colored walls, and I thought it could be cool to
spray "digital graffiti" on the walls with info about the show. My
options were:

  * Plaster semi-transparent text on the wall, which would look cheap
    and lousy
  * Fiddle with some gen AI, but where's the sport in that
  * Spend half a day to figure out how to do that computationally

Since we're here, we all know which option I chose!

Let's get rolling

Say we have this nice picture of a textured wall (Image by kues1 on
Freepik):

Textured cement wall

First, using image color replacement from a while back, we can paint
the wall pink, which already looks neat: Textured cement wall painted
pink

Now, suppose we also have a binary mask depicting the graffiti we'd
like to spray: Binary mask with circle in the center

We can use the mask to mix between the two wall images (original and
painted): Textured cement wall with pink circle

That looks pretty nice, but the mask boundary is too smooth and
detached from the texture. Real paint would behave slightly
differently based on the bumps in the cement. How do we modify the
boundary?

Pathfinding to the rescue

We want to modify the mask's contour, such that it follows the
original contour pretty closely, but also tries to avoid crossing
"high-energy" areas of the image. We can use edge detection to define
these high-energy areas.

Defining the path

To define the path, we sample the contour uniformly, but then wiggle
the indices a bit to start from low-energy areas of the image.

Edge map with contour and sampled points

Next we stitch the new contour as a series of paths using skimage's
graph.route_through_array, which finds the minimum-cost-path through
a cost landscape. To define the cost landscape, we compose the edge
map with the distsance transform of the original contour. We can vary
the weighing between the distance transform and the edge map to
balance how strictly we want the new contour to adhere to the
original one.

Here's an example cost landscape:

Cost map

Here's the minimal cost path in this case:

Cost map with minimum cost path

Finally, after we obtain the new contour, we can use it to define a
new mask and mix the images:

Textured cement wall with pink circle

The effect is subtle but, in my opinion, makes the result a lot more
realistic.

Gimme the code

  * Image color replacement is here
  * Rest of the process described is here. This code is specifically
    tailored to what I wanted, but it shouldn't be hard to make it
    more general

Textured wall with text graffiti

 

  * hi@andersource.dev

  * andersource

Experiments and musings

 

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