The theme of this artifact set is 'If I fits, I sits,' in parody of the popular internet meme depicting cats that are too big for their containers. This artifact set was made with the sample solution, as I did not properly understand the program flow at the time the project was due, and so ran Dijkstra's algorithm tens of thousands of times over a single image.

The way the Intelligent Scissors work, in technical terms, is that it treats the image as a graph, with pixels as nodes and adjacency as edges. Edge costs are determined by taking the normalized color derivatives over each edge. Then, a minimum-path algorithm, Dijstra's algorithm, is run to determine the minimum path from the 'seed point' to the mouse point. This works as a pretty effective edge detector. I selected the edges of some kittens I had fostered, and saved the selection as a 'mask'--black for unselected things, white for selected things. I opened all the cat files in Photoshop and added the mask as a layer, used the magic wand tool to select the white parts, and switched to the cat layer in order to conveniently copy/paste a cat on top of a picture of a thimble.

Upon coming up with this idea and searching for pictures of thimbles, I discovered that someone had previously had the same idea as me.

The original cat image, featuring Ms. Bette Davis at age probably around 4 weeks or so:

The cat mask:

The other original cat image, featuring Ms. Katharine Hepburn at age probably around 6 weeks or so:

The other cat mask:

The original thimble image:

Thimble with my cats: