The Texturize plugin for The GIMP

What is the texturize plugin ?

What is it good for ?

Imagine that you have an image with a small sample of a texture, like a few strawberries (out of a plate full of them), a few square inches of grass (from a large grassy field), or a few dozens of your cat's hairs (your cat really has more than that). If you want to generate a larger texture with this small image, you could just copy-paste it, and put the copies (or "patches") one next to another, but that wouldn't produce a very good result, since the right (or top) part of the image usually doesn't correspond to its left (or bottom) part, when two copies of the image are assembled.

A few images are indeed designed to be copy-pasted one next to another and still look natural, but the result is usually periodic and very monotonous (it looks like wallpaper -- the one on your walls, not the one on your computer desktop!).

The Texturize plugin allows you to get all the strawberries, the whole grass field, or your whole cat (well, it doesn't guess you cat's shape, but you can at least get a lot of his hairs!). Moreover, Texturize lets you actually create tileable textures (which is great for game design). Have a look at the examples section to see what it looks like.

A program named "The GIMP" ? Is that a joke ?

It sure isn't! GIMP stands for "GNU Image Manipulation Program". You probably already know Photoshop, the leader image program by Adobe. Well, GIMP does pretty much the same as Photoshop (if you are a Photoshop power user, you'll find that it still lacks some functions, though). With a small difference: Photoshop costs several hundreds of dollars, whereas GIMP costs absolutely nothing (it is "open source" software, just like Firefox, Linux, or OpenOffice.org). You can download it for free from www.gimp.org, for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. And our plugin is designed for The GIMP.

Similar software

Resynthesizer and Textureops are two gimp plugins from the same author that do a similar job with different algorithms.

Who wrote the plugin ?

The two authors of the first version are Emmanuel Cornet and Jean-Baptiste Rouquier, students in the "Ecole normale supérieure" (ENS) in France. This plugin is the result of a school project in a Computer Vision class, for Renaud Keriven (teacher). However, its development continues even after the class is finished.

The Texturize plugin is based on a theoretical computer science article, called "Graphcut Textures: Image and Video Synthesis Using Graph Cuts", written by Vivek Kwatra, Arno Schödl, Irfan Essa, Greg Turk and Aaron Bobick.

We also borrowed a little part of our code (the graph cut part) from Yuri Boykov and Vladimir Kolmogorov. Here is the webpage of their article (with a link to the code).

The plugin is fully translated into French.