Optimal Texture Mapping

Texture mapping is one of the most important techniques for highquality image synthesis. It can enhance immensely the visual richness of raster-scan images. We address in this paper the problem of mapping planar texture pattern onto arbitrarily curved surfaces. It is well known that such a mapping will inevitably produce distortion for any undevelopable surface. Although many techniques for texture mapping have been presented in the literature 1, to our knowledge, no general method existed which could control or minimize this distortion. We present in this paper a new method for texture mapping. The main idea is to develop the given curved surface approximately on a two-dimensional plane using an approximate locally isometric mapping while minimizing the distortion by an optimization technique. Our experience has shown that by using this technique, one can reduce considerably the distortion and thus improve the quality of the generated images.