A number of researchers have looked at methods for texture synthesis -- given a small patch of some texture, create arbitrarily large regions that duplicate the same texture, without obvious repetition. In other words, the new texture should look random if the initial patch is random, but should still feel like the same texture to a human observer. Texture synthesis is a first step towards image inpainting, where missing parts of a pictur ecan be filled in using synthesis techniques. Although this may be thought of as graphics rather than vision, one can argue that understanding a texture well enough to duplicate it in volves a sophisticated analysis of the original image.
A Demo
We will take advantage of a texture synthesis demo page set up by a French team. You can try out some of the texture patches that they provide. Then try the ones below. (You will have to right-click and save them on your local drive before uploading them to the demo site.)
Search for your own set of textures that you think would be interesting to try out, and see how the method does on them.
How would you characterize the job done by this approach?
You can also try another texture synthesis site, but this one does not currently allow for file uploads. Finally, take a look at the results of Efros and Leung, which is probably the most advanced method of the three but only includes a handful of pregenerated synthesis results.