Texture Synthesizability Assessment via Deep Siamese-Type Network

Abstract

Example-based texture synthesis plays a significant role in many fields, including computer graphics, computer vision, multimedia, and image and video editing and processing. However, it is not easy for all textures to synthesize high-quality outputs of any size from a small input example. Hence, the assessment of the synthesizability of the example textures deserves more attention. Inspired by the broad studies in image quality assessment, we propose a texture synthesizability assessment approach based on a deep Siamese-type network. To our best knowledge, this is the first attempt to evaluate the synthesizability of sample textures through end-to-end training. We first train a Siamese-type network to compare the example texture and the synthesized texture in terms of their similarity and then transfer the experience knowledge obtained in the Siamese-type network to a traditional CNN by fine-tuning, so that to give an absolute score to a single example texture, representing its synthesizability. Not relying on laborious human selection and annotation, these synthesized textures can be generated automatically by example-based synthesis algorithms. We demonstrate that our approach is completely data-driven without hand-crafted features and/or prior knowledge in the field of expertise. Experiments show that our approach improves the accuracy of texture synthesizability assessment qualitatively and quantitatively and outperforms the manual feature-based method.