Artificial Intelligence Helps Designers Create Virtual Textures

Researchers have created a new tool that could aid designers for video games, virtual reality and animation in making more realistic virtual textures. An international team of computer scientists is using an artificial intelligence-based technique called generative adversarial networks (GAN) to train a network to learn to expand small textures into larger ones that still resemble the original sample. "Our approach successfully deals with non-stationary textures without any high level or semantic description of the large-scale structure," Yang Zhou, lead author of the work and an assistant professor at Shenzhen University and Huazhong University of Science & Technology, said in a statement. "It can cope with very challenging textures, which, to our knowledge, no other existing method can handle. The results are realistic designs produced in high-resolution, efficiently, and at a much larger scale."