Interesting approach! The title is misleading though. I do not understand how this relates to pixel art. Pixel art is placing pixel on a constrained canvas and choosing colors on a limited palette which this does not seem to be. Maybe this could be considered blurring effect or image reconstruction/approximation?

Thank you for your feedback! You're absolutely right. This should be image reconstruction using the GA algorithm.

How do you think your example would compare against a simple lowpass + downsampling?

I think for most complicated pixel art, "reimagining" the image is necessary to keep it visually appealing and discernible at low-res, like in the examples here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_art

Thanks for your comment and the great question.

Lowpass filtering with downsampling is definitely a more efficient way to simplify images compared to my approach. This project is an experimental demo of a genetic algorithm evolving random pixel patterns to approximate a target image.

I agree that true pixel art often requires artistic "reimagining" to stay visually appealing. Thanks for your feedback!

Pixel art isn't just bucketing a higher resolution image into a lower resolution. If you're going to use that term, you should probably have at least a basic understanding of the medium.

Thanks for pointing that out. You're absolutely right. What I'm doing here is definitely not pixel art in the traditional sense, and I now realize the term may have been misleading. My apologies for that.

This. I wasn't expecting much, having tried similar claiming algorithms and been disappointing. But even among those, the example image used here looks barely better than downscale and posterize

Thanks for the honest feedback. Totally fair

Cool!

Thanks!