Evolving Approximate Image Filters

Image filtering involves taking a digital image and producing a new image from it. In software packages such as Adobe’s Photoshop, image filters are used to produce artistic versions of original images. Such software usually includes hundreds of different image filtering algorithms, each with many fine-tuneable parameters. While this freedom of exploration may be liberating to artists and designers, it can be daunting for less experienced users. Photoshop provides image filter browsing technology, but does not yet enable the construction of a filter which produces a reasonable approximation of a given filtered image from a given original image. We investigate here whether it is possible to automatically evolve an image filter to approximate a target filter, given only an original image and a filtered version of the original. We describe a tree based representation for filters, the fitness functions and search techniques we employed, and we present the results of experimentation with various search setups. We demonstrate the feasibility of evolving image filters and suggest new ways to improve the process.