Nested Images

A nested image is a form of artistic expression in which one or more secondary figures are embedded within a primary figure one by one. Contours of the primary figure, especially the contours of its inner holes, are used to portray a secondary figure. The secondary figure is totally inside the primary figure, and it would use some inner holes of primary figure as part of itself, which would produce an artistic effect. Here, we present a system for creating such images. It relies on the experience of human perception to minimize the difference between embedded inner figure and primary outer figure. Our system detects the enclosed outer contour of the figure to be nested, and then finds a place in the outer figure to embed it, together with a suitable transformation for doing so, by optimizing an energy based on the distance of contours. Morphing is done by an iterative approach, which warps the corresponding contours of the inner figure and the holes of the outer figure to an appropriate position. We show various nested images generated by our