Perhaps you can use my command line image printer for something like that: https://github.com/Tenzer/explosion.

You might be interested by img2txt (https://github.com/hit9/img2txt) or libcaca (http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca). There are a lot of resources in this old HN thread too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7776112