Abstract—It is hard to avoid ASCII Art in today’s digital world, from the ubiquitous emoticons to the esoteric artistic creations that reside in many people’s e-mail signatures, everybody has come across ASCII art at some stage. Here, we treat automatic ASCII art conversion of color images as an optimization problem, and present an application of our work on Non-Negative Matrix Factorization to this task. In the computer world, there is a constant struggle to keep secret information secret, private information private, and when profits are involved, protect the copyrights of data. To accomplish these increasingly difficult tasks, new methods based on the principals of steganography are being developed and used.

Index Terms—ASCII art, Non-negative matrix factorization, Information hiding, Steganography

Cite: S Prabagar and S Vasuki, "AUTOMATIC ASCII ART CONVERSION OF COLOR IMAGES USING NMF AND STEGANOGRAPHY," International Journal of Electrical and Electronic Engineering & Telecommunications, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 67-75, October 2012.