“Surfacing By Numbers” by Zelinka and Garland

We present a novel technique for surface modelling by example called surfacing by numbers. Our system enables effortless reuse of fine-scale detail from existing 3D models or images. The user simply selects a source region and a target region, and our system transfers detail from the source to the target. The source may be elsewhere on the target surface, on another surface altogether, or even part of an image. As the transfer is formulated as a synthesis problem, solved using a novel surface-based adaptation of graph cut synthesis [Kwatra et al. 2003], the source and target regions need not match in size or shape, and details to be transferred can be geometric, textural or even user-defined in nature. The key insight is to use geodesic fan-based local surface matching [Zelinka and Garland 2004] to find and orient good patches to transfer, and a bounded-distortion local mutual patch parameterization to provide a correspondence across surfaces.

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Kwatra, V., Schödl, A., Essa, I., Turk, G., and Bobick, A. 2003. Graph-cut textures: Image and video synthesis using graph cuts. ACM Transactions on Graphics 22, 3 (July), 277–286.
Zelinka, S., and Garland, M. 2004. Similarity-based surface modelling using geodesic fans. In Proceedings of the Second Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing, Eurographics Association, 209–218.