A survey of exemplar-based texture synthesis methods

•A survey of exemplar-based texture synthesis methods.•Synthesis approaches are divided into procedural, exemplar-based and model-based methods.•Non-parametric methods generally outperform parametric approaches in the synthesis of regular structured textures.•Parametric and stochastic methods have a better efficiency in the synthesis of irregular textures. Texture synthesis has become an important topic in image processing, with many fundamental applications in computer vision and image understanding. The purpose of this survey is to give an overview and classification of texture synthesis approaches. According to how they represent, analyze and synthesize textures, the methods are divided into three families; procedural synthesis, exemplar-based synthesis and model-based synthesis, while focusing on exemplar-based methods including most of the synthesis techniques. Finally, experimental evaluations on different textures show that non-parametric synthesis methods lead to the best results when dealing with regular structured textures while parametric algorithms are better for the synthesis of more irregular textures.