I have thought of the following concept: Procedurally analyzing and rendering textures, which means that from a given photographed or pre-rendered texture, another visually similar texture is generated automatically.
There are several ways to do this. But the best way is to take the (2D) Fourier transform of the texture, to compute the spatial frequency spectrum. Once you have the spatial frequency spectrum, you can adjust the weights/shapes to make slight changes -- or add some randomness -- and then
transform back to the spatial domain. This will produce a new texture with the same spatial statistics of the original, but a different realization.
If you don't have access to a Fourier transform tool, you can compute quantities such as the spatial auto-correlation -- basically a dot-product of an image slice with a "shifted" copy of itself (for a range of shifted values). Once you have these quantities, you can use them to test the quality of your own "created" algorithm or functional fit.
There are also techniques that involve over-laying different spatial gratings (of various frequencies) on the image. This can reveal the dominant spatial frequency content of the image. Sort of like a rudimentary Fourier analysis without the transform.
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Edited by chance, 14 June 2012 - 10:44 AM.