Synthesizing natural textures

Abstract

We present a simple texture synthesis algorithm that is well-suited for a specific class of naturally occurring textures. This class includes quasi-repeating patterns consisting of small objects of familiar but irregular size, such as flower fields, pebbles, forest undergrowth, bushes and tree branches. The algorithm starts from a sample image and generates a new image of arbitrary size the appearance of which is similar to that of the original image. This new image does not change the basic spatial frequencies the original image; instead it creates an image that is a visually similar, and is of a size set by the user. This method is fast and its implementation is straightforward. We extend the algorithm to allow direct user input for interactive control over the texture synthesis process. This allows the user to indicate large-scale properties of the texture appearance using a standard painting-style interface, and to choose among various candidate textures the algorithm can create by performing different number of iterations.