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

• "Texture Synthesis from Multiple Sources", by Li-Yi Wei. In SIGGRAPH 2003 Applications and Sketches.
  [ summary ]
• "Order-Independent Texture Synthesis", by Li-Yi Wei and Marc Levoy. Rejected from SIGGRAPH 2003.
  [ paper ]
• "Order-Independent Texture Synthesis", by Li-Yi Wei and Marc Levoy. Stanford University Computer Science Department Technical Report TR-2002-01.
  [ paper ]
• "Texture Synthesis by Fixed Neighborhood Searching", by Li-Yi Wei. Ph.D. Dissertation.
  [thesis]
• "Texture Synthesis over Arbitrary Manifold Surfaces", by Li-Yi Wei and Marc Levoy. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2001.
  [ paper | talk | images ]
• "Fast Texture Synthesis using Tree-structured Vector Quantization", by Li-Yi Wei and Marc Levoy. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2000.
  [ paper | talk | cool demos | historical notes ]
• "Deterministic Texture Analysis and Synthesis using Tree Structure Vector Quantization", by Li-Yi Wei. In Proceedings of SIBGRAPHI 1999.
  [ paper ]

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