README.md

Ascii Artist

An ascii art generator that's actually good. Does edge detection and selects the most appropriate characters.

Installing

Installing with pip:

pip install asciiartist

Installing from wheel:

Download the wheel file from this project's releases and run

pip install <path/to/wheel>

Quick Start

from asciiartist import asciiartist, display_edges
from PIL import Image

img = Image.open("niko.png")

art, edges = asciiartist(
    img, # The image!
    30,  # Number of lines of the output ascii art
    noise_reduction=2,  # Level of noise reduction (optional)
    line_weight=1,      # Weight of the lines to draw (optional)
    text_ratio=2.2      # Height/width ratio of each character (optional)
)

print(art) # `art` is a string u can just print

# v Display the result of edge detection. 
#   Good for finetuning params.
display_edges(edges)

Build from Source

Run the script ./model/model-gen.py and build the wheel with poetry build -f wheel.

How it works

Roughly, how Ascii Artist generates the drawings:

1. Run edge detection
2. Segment the image for each char
3. Pass each segment through a CNN to get the most appropriate character.

The CNN is trained with distorted images of characters (in font consolas), created in a way that emulates the output of the edge detection.

Bye

^-^

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