Texture Synthesis

Background

Texture synthesis has been used more and more frequently in Hollywood films as a method for realistically portraying natural phenomena and patterns such as fur, marble, clouds, lava, and cloth. Ken Perlin was recognized with an Academy Award (Technical Achievement) for his contribution to special effects in the motion picture industry with his pseudo-random noise generating technique Perlin Noise.

Proposal

This project will be a combination of a research paper and accompanying software simulation. The paper will begin with a short biography on Ken Perlin and the inspiration that led to his development of Perlin Noise. It will discuss texture synthesis techniques in general (maybe), and some of the more easily recognized uses in films. It will conclude with the specifics of Perlin's technique and my implementation of the technique along with any extra experimentation that takes place. I hope to develop several textures in Matlab using this technique and provide source code. If time allows, I would like to develop a Matlab tool that allows interaction with various parameters for real time texture synthesis.

Updated Proposal

After beginning this project, and doing the initial research, I found that I wanted to broaden the topic somewhat by making it about procedural noise in general with a more in depth look at Perlin noise specifically as opposed to only being about texture synthesis. The update project page can be found at Procedural Noise.