The photos look exactly as I'd imagine they should, i.e. if the grid is providing 20% of the color of the original, the result looks 20% as colorful... I'm not sure I get what's "magical" about this?
"Optical Illusion" feels strong here -- really the image is just being desaturated. Same effect can be seen by just replacing random pixels with their grayscale equivalent.<p>Something like:<p><pre><code> width, height, _ = bw_img.shape
pixels = int(width * height * .5)
xs = np.random.choice(width, pixels)
ys = np.random.choice(height, pixels)
bw_img[xs,ys,:] = img[xs, ys, :]</code></pre>
I genuinely don't really understand what's trying to be proven here.<p>I mean, it's just how our eye+brain work indeed. You can make it "better" by dezooming on the images, or "worst" by zooming in, which is just as expected.<p>It doesn't really seem far from other techniques for image compression, just a less good version of those ?
Not to take away from the post (which is nice), but it's kind of funny that the illusion is to make a black and white image look sort of color only by overlaying it with some color.<p>This reminds me of the old King of the Hill episode where Dale says "If you want, I can show you how to make a bomb out of a roll of toilet paper and a stick of dynamite."
This is the same effect JPEG chroma subsampling
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling</a>
encoding takes advantage of.
To think the minecraft image really is in black and white is mind blowing.
I wonder if that could become a minecraft mode and how it would look as a video
The default interpolation for imshow is 'antialiased' so I think the calls to imshow should use interpolation='none' to avoid the line colors bleeding into the gray image