The user provides an input image and a set of plastic bottle caps (a). Our method first calculates a full palette bottle cap image (b) to then optimize the placements of the caps and obtain a result (c) that is as similar as possible to (b), while using only the caps given in (a).

We propose a new image processing problem that consists in approximating an input image with a set of plastic bottle caps. This problem is motivated by the appreciation caused by low resolution imaging, combined with the goal of finding a new destination for plastic caps that would be discarded and possibly damage the environment. Our solution consists in formulating an energy that measures how well a bottle cap art reproduces structures and features from the reference image and maximizing it with a simulated annealing strategy. Examples in the paper show that our method produces high quality results in this very low spatial and color resolution setting.