Hexagonal Image Quilting for Texture Synthesis

Abstract

The synthesis of textures of arbitrary size from smaller samples is a much-noticed problem in the field of computer graphics. While the proposed solutions deliver very good results for regular and near-regular textures, the synthesis of irregular textures is in need of improvement. In this paper, the well-known Image Quilting algorithm is analyzed and its idea is enhanced by replacing the square shape of the patches by a hexagonal shape. In addition, rotation and mirroring of patches are introduced. A penalty map is used to enforce even usage of source data and transformations to make feature repetition less noticeable and improve synthesis from multiple source images. This leads to considerably better results for complex textures like wood, smoke or water waves.