ASCII Art

ASCII art uses only letters, numbers and the other computer keyboard symbols of the ASCII coding system.

I have built an ASCII art generator with Java, and it uses neural network machine learning and several image processing techniques. There are many ways to approach this problem, and I could yet make improvements, but I am pleased with the latest generator version's results.

There is a balance between making a very realistic text representation of an original image, and still being able to perceive the ASCII characters comprising the image so as to stay within the ASCII art style. PNGs are used instead of JPGs to avoid compressing the ASCII characters beyond easy recognition.

Album Covers

The covers of 20 highly recommended albums for which I have generated ASCII art:

None Davy Graham - Folk, Blues and Beyond - 1965 - Acoustic, Folk, Blues Beatles - Revolver - 1966 - Pop, Rock Beach Boys - Surf's Up - 1971 - Pop, Rock Bert Jansch - Rosemary Lane - 1971 - Acoustic, Folk Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells - 1973 - Rock, Acoustic Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon - 1973 - Rock King Crimson - Red - 1974 - Rock Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here - 1975 - Rock Pink Floyd - Animals - 1977 - Rock David Bowie - Low - 1977 - Electronic, Rock Mike Oldfield - Incantations - 1978 - Rock Kraftwerk - The Man Machine - 1978 - Electronic, Pop Nic Jones - Penguin Eggs - 1980 - Acoustic, Folk King Crimson - Discipline - 1981 - Rock Kraftwerk - Computer World - 1981 - Electronic, Pop Pet Shop Boys - Actually - 1987 - Pop, Electronic Suzanne Vega - Solitude Standing - 1987 - Acoustic, Pop Badly Drawn Boy - The Hour of Bewilderbeast - 2000 - Acoustic, Pop Kate Bush - Aerial - 2005 - Pop Beach Boys - Smile - 2011 - Pop, Rock


The selected album cover zoomed out so that the original artwork can be determined at a glance:



The selected album cover zoomed in so that the ASCII character level of detail can be inspected: