The analysis and reconstruction of repetitive textures

Many interesting textures, whether natural, such as reptile skin, or synthetic, such as knitting, are made up of repeating elements. For these textures it can be shown that a suitably painted parallelogram tile can recreate the original image. This tile can be characterised by the vectors that define adjacent sides. Several methods have been proposed to extract these vectors. The paper examines and extends these and introduces new ones. These methods have been applied to a wide variety of images, and interesting and novel ways of modifying the synthesis process to introduce local deformations are explored.