Ant Art

Import this project as a maven project in your prefered IDE

• Intellij - https://www.lagomframework.com/documentation/1.6.x/java/IntellijMaven.html
• Eclipse - https://vaadin.com/learn/tutorials/import-maven-project-eclipse

Examples

Important directories

• ant_art - project root directory
• ant_art/src - source code
• ant_art/inputs - The default directory from where the code will pick input images
• ant_art/outputs - The default directory where the code will dump the outputs
• ant_art/pallets - The default directory where code looks for colour pallets to paint the image
• ant_art/processed - The default directory where code transfers an image after processing.

Main configurations

All the configurations are present in the class config.Configuration. Most of the configurations are set over a course of period through experimentation. Some configurations which shouldn't be changed without experimentation are clearly marked. The ones which can be changed to play with the outputs are mentioned below.

Below configurations can be used by the grader to experiment with the system.

• Configuration.GUI.FPS - Change this setting to increase/decrease the simulation speed but be mindful that if we increase the simulation speed we can't able to process large input files. Adjust Configuarion.MAXIMUM_IMAGE_SIZE accordingly.
• Configuration.GUI.DURATION - Increase/decrease the length of simulation
• Configuration.MAX_ANTS - The number of ants to spawn in the system.
• Configuration.PHEROMNONE_DECAY_RATE - The speed at which home and food pheromone levels are decayed.
• Configuration.MAXIMUM_IMAGE_SIZE - The maximum size the system can handle. Larger images are scaled down. This will in sync with Configuration.GUI.FPS. Larger images require less FPS because of processing overhead.
• Configuration.DEFAULT_TARGET_COOLOR_COUNT - The no of colors ants will look for. This setting highly affects the output.

How to run the project

• To run the project use the Main class.
• After the simulation is over check the output in outputs directory in the root directory of the project.

Acknowledgements

• Thanks Lopsec for there free awesome palettes.
• Thanks Amy Dyer for excellent tutorial on ant colony optimization.