Ascii Art Project (WIP)

Overview

This is an ascii art project I made for fun.

It converts an image into an ascii art image, and it converts a video into an ascii gif.

Prerequisites

• Python
• Pillow - The photo image library
• OpenCV - The video processing library
• Flask - The webserver library
• Pycharm - IDE

How to run it (on Windows)

Create virtual environment

$ python -m venv venv

Activate virtual environment

$ venv\Scripts\activate.bat

Install requirements.txt

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Run Flask

$ set FLASK_APP=src/main.py
$ flask run

How to check that it is working

There are two test photos located in the resources directory. The spider_man2.jpg image is a great example of an image that converts well to ascii art. The Attack On Titan photo demonstrates the limitations of ascii art and does not show up well.

$ curl -v -X POST -H "Content-Type: multipart/form-data" -F "file=@resources\spider_man2.jpg" localhost:5000/ascii

Connect to frontend app

I made a React frontend that can be used to upload an image to this backend server, and an ascii art image is returned to the user. A short video can also be uploaded, and an ascii gif will be returned.

For more information and directions on how to connect the two projects, go to the image-upload-frontend repository here: https://github.com/CSprat451/image-upload-frontend

Status

This project is a work in progress, but is nearing completion. The limitation of using python is that the image processing is quite slow depending on the hardware. I plan on trying to speed up the image processing in this application, if possible.

Inspiration

This project was inspired by Programming Projects for Advanced Beginners by Robert Heaton. This and additional projects are presented on www.robertheaton.com.