A texton for fast and flexible Gaussian texture synthesis

Gaussian textures can be easily simulated by convolving an image sample with a white noise. However, this procedure is not very flexible (it does not allow for non-uniform grids in particular), and becomes computationally heavy for very large domains. We here propose an algorithm that summarizes a texture sample into a synthesis-oriented texton, that is, a small image for which the discrete spot noise simulation (summed and normalized randomly-shifted copies of the texton) is more efficient than the classical convolution algorithm. Using this synthesis-oriented texture summary, Gaussian textures can be generated on-demand in a faster, simpler, and more flexible way.