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 in- cludes quasi-repeating patterns consisting of small objects of fa- miliar but irregular size, such as flower fields, pebbles, forest un- dergrowth, bushes and tree branches. The algorithm starts from a sample image and generates a new image of arbitrary size the ap- pearance of which is similar to that of the original image. This new image does not change the basic spatial frequencies the original im- age; 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 in- put for interactive control over the texture synthesis process. This allows the user to indicate large-scale properties of the texture ap- pearance using a standard painting-style interface, and to choose among various candidate textures the algorithm can create by per- forming different number of iterations.