Pixsort: An artistic pixel sorting program

The purpose of this script is to perform a “pixel sorting” effect that purposefully perturbs an image in order to pretend that it was damaged.

A simple sorting algorithm is used at present: after sharpening the images, edges are detected and pixels are being sorted from the edge with highest intensity (for every row of the image). This is not the most sophisticated algorithm yet but it already yields some interesting results.

Usage

Use -f to indicate the fraction of all rows of the image that should be sorted. To glitch all rows, use 1.0:

$ ./pixsort.py -f 1.0 Images/Lena_small.jpg

If not specified differently with -o, the new image will be the basename of the old image with plus _sorted. For this example, the file name will be Lena_small_sorted.jpg. See below for the results.

Examples

Lena (original)

Lena (sorted)

Requirements

• PIL

Future extensions

• Permit sorting of columns as well
• Handle RGB images
• More algorithms for glitching an image