Structural stability and thermodynamics of artistic composition
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51094/jxiv.858Keywords:
digital art, image analysis, entropy, complexity, stabilityAbstract
Inspired by the way that digital artists zoom out of the canvas to assess the clarity of their works, we introduce a conceptually simple yet effective metric for quantifying the visual clarity of digital images. This metric contrasts original images with progressively ``melted'' counterparts, produced by randomly flipping adjacent pixel pairs. It measures the presence of stable structures, assigning the value zero to completely uniform or random images and finite values for those with discernible patterns. This metric respects the color diversity of the original image and withstands image compression and color quantization. Its suitability for diverse image analysis problems is demonstrated through its effective evaluation of visual textures, the identification of structural transitions in physical systems like the Potts and XY models, and its consistency with color theory in digital arts. This allows us to demonstrate that colors in visual art function as a state variable, akin to the spin configuration in magnets, driving artistic designs to transition between states having distinct visual stability. When combined with the Shannon entropy, which quantifies color diversity, the structural stability metric can serve as a navigation tool for artists to explore pathways on the complex structural information landscape toward the completion of their artwork. As a practical demonstration, we apply our metric to refine and optimize an emote design for a video game. The structural stability metric emerges as a versatile tool for extracting nuanced structural information from digital images, enhancing decision-making and data analysis across scientific and creative domains.
Conflicts of Interest Disclosure
The authors have no competing interests to disclose.Downloads *Displays the aggregated results up to the previous day.
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