Laplacian Texture Synthesis and Mixing on Surfaces

In neighborhood-based texture synthesis, adjacent local regions need to satisfy color continuity constraints in order to avoid visible seams. Such continuity constraints seriously restrict the variability of synthesized textures, making it impossible to generate new textures by mixing multiple input textures with very different base colors. In this paper, we propose to relax such restrictions and decompose synthesis into two relatively disjoint stages. In the first stage, an intermediate synthesized texture is generated by only considering the high frequency details during region search and matching. Such a scheme broadens the search space during texture synthesis, but may produce obvious seams due to large discontinuities in low frequency components. In the second stage, instead of performing local feathering along these discontinuities, we perform Laplacian texture reconstruction, which retains the high frequency details but computes new consistent low frequency components to eliminate the seams. It does not only affect texels close to the discontinuities, but also modifies the rest of the texels. Therefore, it can be viewed as a global feature-preserving smoothing step, and is more effective than local feathering. Experiments indicate that our two-stage synthesis can produce desirable results for regular texture synthesis as well as texture mixing from multiple sources.