Gs4 Security: Escher Relativity

Sunday, 6 January 2013

Escher Relativity

A significant part of the problem was figuring out exactly what distortion Escher had used to blow up the centre of the picture; firstly because we wanted to "undistort" the picture in order to be able to copy the townscape, and secondly so that we could transform our final photograph into something that looked like Escher's print. I tried several different ideas before I found one that produced plausible results. An unfortunate side-effect of the transformation is that the resolution suffers in the middle of the picture, where it's expanded by a factor of four. I'm using a 1.3 megapixel camera, and our initial results didn't look too great. Our eventual solution was to take a number of separate shots, zooming in on distinct parts of the model, and glue them together as a mosaic panorama. The image above was constructed in this way from 16 images. The final Escher transformation was implemented in a custom C program that I hacked together.