Time Varying Textures | Two Minute Papers #78

Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Károly Zsolnai-Fehér. This research group is known for their extraordinary ideas, and this piece of work is, of course, no exception. This paper is about time varying textures. Have a look at these photographs that were taken at a different time. And the million dollar question is, can we simulate how this texture would look if we were to go forward in time? A texture weathering simulation, if you will. The immediate answer is that of course not. However, in this piece of work, a single input image is taken, and without any user interaction, the algorithm attempts to understand how this texture might have looked in the past. Now, let's start out by addressing the elephant in the room: this problem can obviously not be solved in the general case for any image. However, if we restrict our assumptions to textures that contain a repetitive pattern, then it is much more feasible to identify the weathering patterns. To achieve this, an age map is built where the red regions show the parts that are assumed to be weathered. You can see on the image how these weathering patterns break up the regularity. Leaning on the assumption that if we go back in time, the regions marked with red will recede, and if we go forward in time, they will grow, we can write a really cool weathering simulator that creates results that look like wizardry. Broken glass, cracks, age rings on a wooden surface, you name it. But we can also use this technique to transfer weathering patterns from one image onto another. Textures with multiple layers are also supported, which means that it can handle images that are given as a sum of a regular and irregular patterns. The blue background is regular and quite symmetric, but the "no parking" text is lacking these regularities. And the amazing thing is that the technique still works on such cases. The results are also demonstrated by putting these weathered textures on 3D models so we can see them all in their glory in our own application. Thanks for watching, and for your generous support, and I'll see you next time!