TextureSynthesisonSurfaces

Texture synthesis is the process of replicating the statistical and perceptual properties of a user-specified example over a larger surface. Since the surface can have arbitrary topology and the mapping quality is judged using human perception, it is a difficult process to automate. In the past there have been several methods proposed that attempted to solve this problem. We came up with an alternative method that comes with several advantages, particularly separation of texture preprocessing from synthesis, automation, and fast synthesis of quality textures. These make it ideal for texturing a large set of objects (a forest scene containing many trees is a good example), or for interactive mesh modeling. Once a texture is preprocessed, the texture synthesis takes only seconds. A library of preprocessed textures can be stored on a disk and used when needed. Since the algorithm essentially performs texture mapping, it is also very memory efficient, and the rendering process is fast.

The basic idea behind the algorithm is to separate texture generation into two independent phases: texture preprocessing and texture synthesis. The concept of dividing the texture generation process into preprocessing and synthesis phases has been successfully applied before to 2-D textures, but not to patch-based texture synthesis. While texture preprocessing is relatively slow, it only has to be done once per texture. At the same time, texture preprocessing makes the actual texture synthesis process fast.

Below are some examples of synthesized textures using our method.

• Sebastian Magda
• David Kriegman

• Sebastian Magda and David Kriegman
  Fast Texture Synthesis on Arbitrary Meshes [pdf]
  Proceedings of the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, 2003, pp. 82-89.