Texture Analysis and Synthesis


Input Sample

Synthesized Result

Introduction

Texture is a ubiquitous visual experience. It can describe a wide variety of surface characteristics such as terrain, plants, minerals, fur and skin. Since reproducing the visual realism of the real world is a major goal for computer graphics, textures are commonly employed when rendering synthetic images. These textures can be obtained from a variety of sources such as hand-drawn pictures or scanned photographs. Hand-drawn pictures can be aesthetically pleasing, but it is hard to make them photo-realistic. Most scanned images, however, are of inadequate size and can lead to visible seams or repetition if they are directly used for texture mapping.

Texture synthesis is an alternative way to create textures. Because synthetic textures can be made of any size, visual repetition is avoided. Texture synthesis can also produce tileable images by properly handling the boundary conditions. Potential applications of texture synthesis are also broad; some examples are image de-noising, occlusion fill-in, and compression.

The problem of texture synthesis can be stated as follows: Given a texture sample, synthesize a new texture that, when perceived by a human observer, appears to be generated by the same underlying stochastic process. An example is shown in the above figure. Our goal is to develope a new texture synthesis algorithm that is efficient, general, user-friendly, and able to produce high quality textures. In addition, we would like to extend the horizon of texture synthesis by exploring a variety of new applications based on our algorithm.

People

Li-Yi Wei
Marc Levoy

Papers

Additional Information

Texture synthesis examples!
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A list of Frequently Asked Questions.
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Random Text Synthesis

Other Texture Research Pages

David Heeger's Pyramid Based Texture Analysis/Synthesis
Jeremy De Bonet's texture synthesis page
Eero Simoncelli's texture synthesis page
Alyosha Efros' texture synthesis page
Michael Ashikhmin's texture synthesis page
Dani Lischinski's Texture Mixing and Texture Movie Synthesis homepage
Microsoft Research's Chaos Mosaic and Patch-based Texture Synthesis
Greg Turk's Texture Synthesis on Surfaces

Some Online Texture Images