Patent ID: 7129954

Claim:
A multi-dimensional texture synthesis apparatus to synthesize a new multi-dimensional texture using one or more texture images, comprising: a reference multi-dimensional texture generator receiving, as one or more reference texture images, one or more texture images captured or created with a plurality of different conditions to generate a reference multi-dimensional texture including a codebook and a reference index image, the codebook including a set of color information of same-position pixels of one or more reference texture images, and the reference index image including a set of indexes for addressing the codebook; a reference multi-dimensional texture quantizer to quantize the reference multi-dimensional texture at one or more quantization levels and generate a quantized codebook and a quantized reference index image; an index image synthesizer to synthesize a new index image having a specified size from the quantized reference index image using a hierarchical structure of the reference multi-dimensional texture corresponding to one of the quantization levels; a new multi-dimensional texture generator to generate a new multi-dimensional texture by combining the new index image with the quantized codebook; and a target multi-dimensional texture generator to generate a target multi-dimensional texture including a set of color information of the same-position pixels by receiving one or more texture images as one or more target texture images, and a target index image generator to generate a target index image by quantizing the target multi-dimensional texture using the codebook, and wherein the index image synthesizer uses the target index image, and the target index image generator includes: means for inputting one or more codebooks and generating the target multi-dimensional texture at one or more quantization levels, means for replacing the codebook of the target multi-dimensional texture with the codebook input from the reference multi-dimensional texture quantizer, means for changing an index of each pixel of the target multi-dimensional texture to an index of the codebook containing multi-dimensional pixel data of highest similarity obtained by comparison between the target multi-dimensional pixel data generated by the means for generating the target multi-dimensional texture and the reference multi-dimensional pixel data in the codebook, and means for outputting an image obtained by changing indexes of all pixels as the target index image.