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Obviously, research of this type is far from over. There are an infinitely many number of digital filters that could be implemented to solve artistic problems to aid digital artists in the creation of their artwork. And, as I propose, I feel that given the right motivation and artists with the proper computer science background, the filter algorithm may become as important in digital art as the final composition. This is an interesting concept. In some ways it is almost like creating a new art medium with each new filter algorithm.
Besides just creating new filters, optimization of these algorithms is also an important task. An entire separate honors thesis could be carried out on optimizing my FilterExplorer program. As any user of the application knows, applying a filter to any image takes a noticeable amount of time. Even with my Pentium III 500Mhz PC, application of these filters takes considerable time. The reason is simply the large amount of computations that are performed for a particular filter. Out of curiosity, I counted the number of times some of the more crucial operations are done in execution of the blur filter (without the ‘fast blur’ check on). I used an image with pixel dimensions 668 x 480 and a radius of 10 pixels for the test. The results: 653,946,984 assignments; 893,840,192 additions; 148,135,680 multiplications; and 141,402,240 square root operations. That is a lot of processing to produce such a seemingly simple effect! But obviously there are better ways to implement this sort of processing. It took over 40 seconds to return the 10 pixel radius blur on my computer. The same blur in Adobe® Photoshop® is done in less than one second. (!)
The computer science and art merger is nowhere close to being complete. In fact I feel it is just beginning. Next year I will continue this pursuit at the University of Utah, where right now a Ph.D. student is studying the new computer science/art combo area of Non Photo-realistic Rendering (NPR). NPR deals with taking an object and rendering it, not as a camera would (like all the computer animated movies, such as the Disney/Pixar film, Toy Story), but instead as an artist would. The implications of this are astounding. We may one day be able to set a computer in front of a landscape and watch it (literally) paint it with real paint and brushes, on a canvas, in the style of Monet.
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