Shape from texture: integrating texture-element extraction and surface estimation

A method is presented for identifying texture elements while simultaneously recovering the orientation of textured surfaces. A multiscale region detector, based on measurements in a ∇² G (Laplacian-of-Gaussian) scale space, is used to construct a set of candidate texture elements. True elements are selected from the set of candidate elements by finding the planar surface that best predicts the observed areas of the latter. Results are shown for a variety of natural textures, including waves, flowers, rocks, clouds, and dirt clods