quads.js

Shameless clone in Node.js of @fogleman's Quads. Especially the color distance formula, since I couldn't get one to work well until I used his. However, @fogleman uses Python builtin images library, which already provides cropping and histograms for a cropped part of an image.

Node.js does not provide any of those, so I used pngjs for loading and saving PNG, js-priority-queue for the Priority Queue (choosing the node with the greatest error, taking area into account) and the dynamic programming algorithm for 2D submatrix sum (O(N²) setup, O(1) lookup).

You can see examples of this working in the original Quads repository. He also has a script to convert the generated frames to gif animations and has the option to paint circles and rounded rectangles, try it out.

If you find this project useful and want other options implemented (other formats, canvas, scaling...), leave a feature request and I'll see if I can work it out. Cheers!

Usage

  node quads.js <filename> [options]

Find out about the syntax using:

  node quads.js --help

Currently, it is possible to enable borders, specify maximum number of node expansions (iterations), change the required error difference between frames, shape of nodes (rectangles or rounded/circles) and color of background and borders (when enabled).

Iterations defaults to 1024, and error threshold defaults to 0.5. With a greater number of iterations the script will generate more frames (or not, if the error is already very low, near the threshold) and with a greater threshold less frames will be generated for splits that reduce the error very little.

Differences with original repository

Besides the aforementioned missing features in this project, this script does not limit the depth or size of each node in the QuadTree, so the results may vary a little. I provided a commandline option to turn on the borders (sometimes they are great, other times the result without borders is much nicer) and I plan to experiment with color distance formulae, different borders (maybe colorful ones) and maybe use gifencoder to generate the gifs from the script.

Samples

Rectangular nodes, with, without, and with randomly-colored borders.

Rounded nodes.

If the image is a square (aspect ratio 1:1) the option "rounded" produces circles.

All the source images were obtained from alpha.wallhaven.cc and I claim no ownership on any of them.

TODO

• Use getopt to have a nicer CLI.
• Implement configurable depth limit in the QuadTree.
• Tests? I should test the QuadTree.

License

MIT license, do as you wish.