Evolving mazes from images

We propose a novel reaction diffusion (RD) simulator to evolve image-resembling mazes. The evolved mazes faithfully preserve the salient interior structures in the source images. Since it is difficult to control the generation of desired patterns with traditional reaction diffusion, we develop our RD simulator on a different computational platform, cellular neural networks. Based on the proposed simulator, we can generate the mazes that exhibit both regular and organic appearance, with uniform and/or spatially varying passage spacing. Our simulator also provides high controllability of maze appearance. Users can directly and intuitively "paint" to modify the appearance of mazes in a spatially varying manner via a set of brushes. In addition, the evolutionary nature of our method naturally generates maze without any obvious seam even though the input image is a composite of multiple sources. The final maze is obtained by determining a solution path that follows the user-specified guiding curve. We validate our method by evolving several interesting mazes from different source images.