Parallel patch-based texture synthesis

Abstract

Fast parallel algorithms exist for pixel-based texture synthesizers. Unfortunately, these synthesizers often fail to preserve structures from the exemplar without the user specifying additional feature information. On the contrary, patch-based synthesizers are better at capturing and preserving structural patterns. However, they require relatively slow algorithms to layout the patches and stitch them together. We present a parallel patch-based texture synthesis technique that achieves high degree of parallelism. Our synthesizer starts from a low-quality result and adds several patches in parallel to improve it. It selects patches that blend in a seamless way with the existing result, and that hide existing visual artifacts. This is made possible through two main algorithmic contributions: An algorithm to quickly find a good cut around a patch, and a deformation algorithm to further align features crossing the patch boundary. We show that even with a uniform parallel random sampling of the patches, our improved patch stitching achieves high quality synthesis results. We discuss several synthesis strategies, such as using patches of decreasing size or using various amounts of deformation during the optimization. We propose a complete implementation tuned to take advantage of massive GPU parallelism.