Structure tensor based synthesis of directional textures for virtual material design

Exemplar-based texture synthesis schemes are promising for virtual material design. They provide impressive results in many cases, but fail in difficult situations with large and multi-scale patterns, or with long range directional variations. Since a prior synthesis of a geometric layer may help in the synthesis of the texture layer, a two-stage structure/texture synthesis algorithm is proposed. At the first stage, a structure tensor map carrying information about the local orientation is synthesized from the exemplar´s data, and at the second stage, the synthesized tensor field is used to constrain the synthesis of the texture. Results show that the proposed approach not only yields better synthesized textures, but also successfully synthesizes the output texture in many situations where traditional algorithms fail to reproduce the exemplar´s patterns, which paves the way towards the synthesis of accurately large and multi-scale patterns as it is the case for pyrolytic carbon samples showing laminar structures observed by Transmission Electronic Microscopy.