One Year in Colors

Post date: Feb 09, 2011 5:12:3 PM

Inspired by Viégas and Wattenberg and their amazing Flickr flow, I created a Python script to create a similar result from a video. The result below is made from Eirik Solheims video which is a timelapse of an entire year.

This image shows from left to right January through December. The grey areas to the left are due to the snow ( also see the video below ), and the green area in the middle show trees getting their leaves. The image below shows the same image as above, but here using polar coordinates instead, to highlight the seasonal change :)

Technical Details

To create a summary of the colors that occur in a video, we need to compress the colors in each frame down from three dimension (RGB) to one. We need to stick to one dimension so we can create a static image as above, where the horizontal dimension is used to depict time. To perform this dimensionality reduction, I utilized a space filling curve named the Hilbert curve. After reducing the dimensionality of the colors in one frame, I sorted them, and then inserted the colors as a single column in the image above. One visible artifact of using the Hilbert curve, is the multiple bands of green and brown you see appear before summer. Optimally, visually similar colors should be closer together. If I get the time, I will experiment with other sorting algorithms of color.

One Year in Two Minutes

The source video by Eirik Solheim

DOWNLOADS AND COMMERCIAL USE?

All images are licensed with a creative commons license. Meaning that you can use it for what you like, as long as it is non-commercial, you give me credit and you share any alterations with the same license.