Converts a live video feed from a built-in or connected camera into ASCII art. On-screen UI options allow for the use of different ASCII character sets, changes to the font size, and changes to the contrast ratio.
- Python
- Pygame
- Computer Vision library
I've always been fascinated by ASCII art and how it's possible to generate recognizable, near-photorealistic images using only text characters. Although the creation of these images/text files always seems like magic, it's a fairly straightforward conversion of pixel brightness values to monospaced text characters that take up varying degrees of whitespace. In this implementation, I'm using the Computer Vision library to read pixels from the camera and pygame to display the characters on screen.
After completing an online AI course, I was looking for projects to use with the Computer Vision library, and this seemed like a fun application. Like anything else, getting the proof of concept done was the easy part; making a polished program took 90% of the time.