Measures for homogeneity of a finite sequence - approximating an image with lines.

I am trying to approximate a grayscale image with lines, using a greedy algorithm. For our purposes, the line is a finite sequence, with each number being between $0$ and $1$, where $0$ is pure white and $1$ pure black. I evaluate the fitness of a line as follows:

Treat a line as a set of coordinates (pixels) $L \subset \mathbb{N_0^2}$. I use the Bresenham Line Algorithm to decide what pixels belong on the line.
The function $f(p_{i,j}) \in [0, 1]$ takes the color value of a pixel at position $i, j$ and outputs the color value that that pixel will take, after the line goes over it. In the simplest case, where the lines are always black, it just outputs $1$, but it could also output $p_{i,j} + \frac{1 - p_{i,j}}{2}$ for 50% transparent lines etc.
The function $g(i, j) \in [0, 1]$ gives the color value of the pixel at $i, j$ in the target image.
Then the fitness functions is given as the sum of differences between the pixels on the line in the target image and the current image after is drawn: $$F(L) = \frac{1}{|L|} \cdot \sum_{(i, j) \in L} |f(p_{i,j}) - g(i,j)|$$ The best line is the one that has lowest value of $F(L)$.

The problem that I've encountered is that an image like this: is being approximated like that: because vertical lines'fit' the image the best. However, this destroys the details that humans, who would look at the picture, care about. To counter that I thought of factoring in the 'homogeneity' of a line, by treating the line as a sequence instead of a set, and adding a penalty to the fitness score, if a line goes over a section that contains a lot of changes.

Question: What suitable measures of 'homogeneity' in this context are there?

For reference, I would like the result to look something like that: here I changed the color of the background from white to gray to achieve the result, but it only works because this image is so simple, the same approach wouldn't work with more complex images.

• Just trying to understand the approximation concept: The input is a grayscale image (got that), the output is a set of line segments that set pixels to either black or white when digitised (eg via Bresenham Line Drawing)? – Patrick Hew Jul 21 '18 at 11:15
• Could you please add an example(s) of grayscale images that are processed in the way you want? Thanks. – Patrick Hew Jul 21 '18 at 11:18
• @PatrickHew Thank you for suggestion. I added the description of the fitness function and the reference result. But I'm not asking for a better algorithm that would do this, I'm just asking how to measure how much the values on the line change. I thought of things like summing up the differences between successive pixels, or trying a Fourier transform and penalize lines with greater frequencies, but maybe there is a more elegant statistical measure for this - I just don't know much statistics. – ZyTelevan Jul 21 '18 at 12:29