Artificial texturing: An aid to surface visualization

Texture is an important surface characteristic which provides a great deal of information about the nature of a surface, and several computationally complex algorithms have been implemented to replicate realistic textures in computer shaded images. Perceptual psychologists have recognized the importance of surface texture as a cue to space perception, and have attempted to delineate which factors provide primary shape information. A rendering algorithm is presented which uses these factors to produce a texture specifically designed to aid visualization. Since the texture is not attempting to replicate an actual texture pattern, it is called “artificial” texturing. This algorithm avoids the computational limitations of other methods because this “artificial” approach does not require complex mappings from a defined texture space to the transformed image to be rendered. A simple filtering method is presented to avoid unacceptable aliasing.