Yesterday I set my webcam grabbing images from television. I made some modifications to the frame grabber to archive time stamped versions of each image. The net result: a big directory of image files. I got it in my head to try to use these images to make image mosaics. These are images which are made up of small subimages, but when viewed from a distance display another picture. After an hour of programming, I produced
this (highly shrunken) result. The final fullsize image is 6144×8640.

The program itself is pretty simple. I scan the directory and compute the average luminance for each image and store those into a linked list. I then scan the target image, and for each pixel in the target image select the closest image in the sources.

I can think of several enhancements to this basic idea to make higher quality image mosaics (including color), but for a sunday programming experiment, I found this pretty
satisfying.