Textures have been a research focus for many years in human perception, computer graphics and computer vision. Recently, research activities in this area emphasize on texture synthesis. Given one or more example textures, a texture synthesis algorithm generates a new one bearing the same visual characteristics. The synthesized texture can be made of arbitrary size specified by the user. It can be used in many fields such as computer animation, virtual reality, data compression,

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... c rendering and so on. In this paper, the basic concepts of texture and the development process of texture synthesis techniques are introduced first. Then the recent key patents on texture synthesis schemes are reviewed. Finally, this paper points out future works in this area.