Real-time Texture Synthesis and Concurrent Random-access Rendering for Low-cost GPU Chip Design

Abstract

Numerous algorithms have been researched in the area of texture synthesis. However, it remains difficult to design a low-cost synthesis scheme capable of generating high quality results while simultaneously achieving real-time performance. Additional challenges include making a scheme parallel and being able to partially render/synthesize high-resolution textures. Furthermore, it would be beneficial for a synthesis scheme to be able to incorporate Texture Compression and minimize the bandwidth usage, especially on mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a practical method which has low computational complexity and produces textures with small storage requirements. Through use of an index table, random access of the texture is another essential advantage, with which parallel rendering becomes feasible including generation of mip-map sequences. Integrating the index table with existing compression algorithms, for example ETC or PVRTC, the bandwidth is further reduced and avoids the need for a separate, computationally expensive pass to compress the synthesized output. It should be noted that our texture synthesis achieves real-time performance and low power consumption even on mobile devices, for which texture synthesis has been traditionally considered too expensive.