Evolving Textures from High Level Descriptions: Gray with an Accent Color

This paper describes a prototype evolutionary texture synthesis tool meant to assist a designer or artist by automatically discovering many candidate textures that fit a given stylistic description. The textures used here are small color images, created by procedural texture synthesis. This prototype uses a single stylistic description: a textured gray image with a small amount of color accent. A hand-written prototype fitness function rates how well an image meets this description. Genetic programming uses the fitness function to evolve programs written in a texture synthesis language. A tool like this can automatically generate a catalog of variations on the given theme. A designer could then scan through these to pick out those that seem aesthetically interesting. Their procedural "genetic" representation would allow them to be further adjusted by interactive evolution. It also allows re-rendering them at arbitrary resolutions and provides a way to store them in a highly compressed form allowing lossless reconstruction.