  Exemplar-based texture synthesis is the process of generating, from an input
sample, new texture images of arbitrary size and which are perceptually
equivalent to the sample. The two main approaches are statistics-based methods
and patch re-arrangement methods. In the first class, a texture is
characterized by a statistical signature; then, a random sampling conditioned
to this signature produces genuinely different texture images. The second class
boils down to a clever "copy-paste" procedure, which stitches together large
regions of the sample. Hybrid methods try to combine ideas from both approaches
to avoid their hurdles. The recent approaches using convolutional neural
networks fit to this classification, some being statistical and others
performing patch re-arrangement in the feature space. They produce impressive
synthesis on various kinds of textures. Nevertheless, we found that most real
textures are organized at multiple scales, with global structures revealed at
coarse scales and highly varying details at finer ones. Thus, when confronted
with large natural images of textures the results of state-of-the-art methods
degrade rapidly, and the problem of modeling them remains wide open.
