Atlas record: https://www.aitimeline.dev/en/events/evt-0803/
Research · September 20 – 27, 1999
A texture grown from a sample
In September 1999 at ICCV Alexei Efros and Thomas Leung of Berkeley showed texture synthesis without a model: a new image grows from a seed one pixel at a time, each pixel taken from a place in the sample whose neighbourhood resembles what has been made so far. There is one parameter, the window size.
Why it matters
Earlier methods described a texture by statistics and reproduced only random-looking samples. Here the sample itself became the model, and the same algorithm, unchanged, filled holes in a photograph. Patch-based methods of the 2000s rest on it, as does the Markov assumption that pix2pix in 2016 names outright as inherited from texture models.
ICCV 1999 proceedings, volume 2, pages 1033-1038. The conditional distribution of a pixel given its known neighbours is estimated by finding all similar neighbourhoods in the sample and picking one at random; Figure 2 shows windows of 5, 11, 15 and 23 pixels. The authors name the weaknesses themselves: the algorithm is "quite slow" and sometimes "grows garbage" or gets stuck copying the sample verbatim.
The record does not claim a computing time: the paper gives no figure for it.
Event record
- Event date
- September 20, 1999 – September 27, 1999
- Timeline date
- Event date
- Verification
- Sources gathered automatically · September 25, 2026
- Lines
- ID
- evt-0803
The dates of the Seventh International Conference on Computer Vision in Kerkyra according to Crossref; the day of the talk is not given.
Related events
Earlier
Later
- Contrasts Inpainting: a restorers’ word for a machine 2000links to this record
The paper names Efros and Leung’s texture synthesis as a way to fill a region with a pre-selected texture and builds a method that needs no source for the new information.
- Builds on Image Analogies: a filter from a pair of examples 2001links to this record
The paper derives its method from texture synthesis by nearest-neighbourhood search and names Efros and Leung among its authors.
- Extends A hole in a picture filled from other photographs 2007links to this record
The paper traces existing completion methods to Efros and Leung’s texture synthesis and drops their assumption that the material for the fill lies in the same image.
- Builds on PatchMatch: patches found at random 2009links to this record
The paper opens its survey with Efros and Leung introducing non-parametric texture synthesis by patches from a sample in 1999, the search it speeds up.
- Enables pix2pix: one model for image translation 2016
pix2pix says its discriminator models the image as a Markov random field, "the common assumption in models of texture", and cites this paper first.