Creating Texture Exemplars from Unconstrained Images

Texture is an essential feature in modeling the appearance of objects and is instrumental in making virtual objects appear interesting and/or realistic. Unfortunately, obtaining textures is a labor intensive task requiring parameter tuning for procedural methods or careful photography and post-processing for natural images. Many texture synthesis techniques have been developed to generate textures of arbitrary spatial extent, but these techniques require the user to first produce an exemplar consisting solely of the desired texture. We present a fast method using diffusion manifolds to locate textures in unconstrained photographs, and extract exemplar tiles. The method requires the user to only specify a single point within the image containing the desired texture and the scale of the desired texture. The user may tune the result using simple interactions. The method is non-local, in the sense that the desired texture does not have to appear in a single contiguous region in the source image. This document is a summary of our work and system. A full account is available online.