Texture Mixer: A Network for Controllable Synthesis and Interpolation of Texture

This paper addresses the problem of interpolating visual textures. We formulate the problem of texture interpolation by requiring (1) by-example controllability and (2) realistic and smooth interpolation among an arbitrary number of texture samples. To solve it we propose a neural network trained simultaneously on a reconstruction task and a generation task, which can project texture examples onto a latent space where they can be linearly interpolated and reprojected back onto the image domain, thus ensuring both intuitive control and realistic results. We show several additional applications including texture brushing and texture dissolve, and show our method outperforms a number of baselines according to a comprehensive suite of metrics as well as a user study.