Introduction
A long time ago I developed some Fortran mapping software which used
Voronoi tessellation
to display data. Part of the process involved first calculating Delaunay
triangles for the data set. My code for the Delaunay triangulation sat idle
until recently when I saw a demo of an iPad drawing app called
Poly on
BBC's Click
program. This looked
pretty cool, and since I do not have an iPad I decided to see if I could do
something similar for Windows. The result was
Bill's Delaunay Portraits program.
In simple terms, a Delaunay portrait is created when points selected on a base image are joined up to form triangles, and those triangles are filled with color which represents the color of the image within the triangle. So for example:
Raw picture | Points added both programmatically and manually | Delaunay triangles calculated and displayed | Triangles filled in, points and triangles hidden |
The program, Bill's Delaunay Portraits, contains routines that allow the user to automatically populate the points over a selected area of the original picture. Final touching up is easily done manually, which means the portraits are very quick to generate. I won't go into the mathematics required to calculate the Delaunay triangles here, there are plenty of sites that do a wonderful job of that (I have listed a handful of them at the foot of this page).
You can see some examples of Delaunay portraits created using my program in my Gallery, as well as a more detailed description of the actual program should you be interested.
For me personally, this project was just an interesting exercise in programming, and I have no plans to release either the code or the executable.
Thank you for looking!
Bill Turnbull
Jakarta, 2012
Delaunay Portrait Related Links:
-
Jonathan Puckey's Delaunay Raster site - Jonathan is a professional graphical designer and is undoubtedly the master of this technique. His software is infinitely more sophisticated than my simple VB code, as can be clearly seen from some of his Imagery.
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Delaunay Portrait by ~okansoyluturk
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Some Delaunay Portraits created using Poly at Design You Trust
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Homepage of Jean-Christophe Naour the creator of Poly
Delaunay Triangulation Related Links:
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Delaunay triangulation on Wikipedia
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YouTube video about Delaunay Triangulation
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Discussion at codeguru.com
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Super fast Delaunay code on PlanetSourceCode
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A fast algorithm for constructing Delaunay triangulation in the plane - S.W.Sloan - vintage code from 1987