Pixel search algorithm
Continuing to exploit my recently found spare time, I thought it would be fun to see what happens if you scan a bitmap in search for the greatest color pixels. Turned out to be pretty cool! Even though you can probably do this a million times faster in Photoshop, I’m still pretty happy with the result. Check the images below. Check my flickr site for more details.
So, how does it work:
- Sort all the pixels by color. 0xFFFFFF first, 0×000000 last, this means that yellowish pixels will be searched first.
- Remove the first pixel from the sorted pixels, and find the neighboring pixel with the greatest value. Remove this pixel from the list.
- Continue until no neighbors are found.
- Repeat step one until no pixels are left.
It is a very slow algorithm, so I made this video of the process and increased the speed.
UPDATE: made it faster, sorting the pixels had a slow element to it. Now the algorithm is finished within several seconds.
