i've always wanted to code up and play with some of the texture synthesis algorithms out there since reading the Graphcut paper from Siggraph 2003. i remember thinking it was the coolest thing ever and wondering why it wasn't being used for everything everywhere all the time. back then i found a Gimp plugin that purported to implement it but the results i got with it were absolutely awful.

anyway it came up while chatting with Kirill a few month back and led to me experimenting a bit with image quilting between matches of Hearthstone one sunday. the image quilting paper from 2001 preceded the graph cut stuff and looked much simpler to implement so that's what i decided to try first.

i was hoping to use it to stick together bodies in horrific arrangement like the panoramic fails but i think to get reasonable results you really have to go all the way to graph cuts for that. fortunately i did find something image quilting really excels at: MEXICAN FOOD SYNTHESIS! and so was born INFINIMEX. :)

after the first experiments i upgraded it a bit with laplacian pyramid blending to smooth out sour cream and cheese transitions. (so you might see those are kinda rough on earlier screenshots and vids but better on the later ones)