Review on Recent Patents in Texture Synthesis

Computer graphics applications often use textures to render synthetic images. These textures can be obtained from a variety of sources such as hand-drawn pictures or scanned photographs. Texture synthesis is an alternative way to create textures. Because synthetic textures can be made any size, visual repetition is avoided. The goal of texture synthesis can be stated as follows: given a texture example, synthesize a new texture that, when perceived by a human observer, appears to be generated by the same underlying process. This paper reviews the recent patents on texture synthesis schemes. The key components in a texture synthesis algorithm, such as neighborhood matching, block sampling, anisometric synthesis, etc., are discussed. Then we discuss the applications of texture synthesis in texture magnification and image repairing. This paper also points out future works on this issue.