Piece together several images into one big image

Question

I\'m trying to put several images together into one big image, and am looking for an algorithm which determines the placing most optimally. The images can\'t be rotated or r

Answer 1

Optimal packing is hard, but there might be simplifications available to you depending on the details of your problem domain. A few ideas:

1. If you can carve up your bitmaps into equally sized tiles, then packing is trivial. Then, on-demand, you'd reassemble the bitmaps from the tiles.

2. Sort your images largest to smallest, then, for each image use a greedy-allocator to select the first available sub-rectangle that fits the image.

3. Use a genetic algorithm. Start with several randomly-selected layouts. Score them based on how tightly they're packed. Mix solutions from the top scoring ones, and iterate until you get to an acceptable score.