The Infinite Doodler: Expanding Textures Within Tightly Constrained Manifolds

The Visual Computer, Forthcoming. (2023)

Abstract

Hand-drawn doodles present an interesting and difficult set of textures to model and synthesize. Unlike the typical natural images that are most often used in texture synthesis studies, the doodles examined here are characterized by the use of sharp, irregular, and imperfectly scribbled patterns, frequent imprecise strokes, haphazardly connected edges, and randomly or spatially shifting themes. The almost binary nature of the doodles examined makes it difficult to hide common mistakes such as discontinuities. Further, there is no color or shading to mask flaws and repetition; any process that relies on, even stochastic, region copying is readily discernible. To tackle the problem of synthesizing these textures, we model the underlying generation process of the doodle taking into account potential unseen, but related, expansion contexts. We demonstrate how to generate infinitely long textures, such that the texture can be extended far beyond a single image's source material. This is accomplished by creating a novel learning mechanism that is taught to condition the generation process on its own generated context -- what was generated in previous steps -- not just upon the original material.

Research Areas