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. 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. 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.