Wavelet Based Texture Analysis for Image Retrieval Applications

Texture is a ubiquitous experience and can describe a variety of natural phenomena with repetition, such as sound (background noise in a machine room), motion (animal running), visual appearance (surface color and geometry) and human activities (daily lives). Since reproducing the realism of the physical world is a major goal for computer graphics, textures are important for rendering synthetic images and animations. However, as textures are so diverse it is difficult to describe and reproduce them under a common framework. In this paper, new methods for synthesizing textures are presented. The initial part of the paper is concerned with a basic algorithm for reproducing image textures. The limitations of traditional methods can be overcome by the proposed approach based on multi-resolution (search neighborhoods and tree-structured vector quantization) analysis. The paper concerns with various extensions of the basic algorithm; the extensions concentrate on either reproducing textures of different physical phenomena such as motions, or creating textures in novel ways in addition to mimic existing ones.