Multi-scale terrain texturing using generative adversarial networks

We propose a novel, automatic generation process for detail maps that allows the reduction of tiling artifacts in real-time terrain rendering. This is achieved by training a generative adversarial network (GAN) with a single input texture and subsequently using it to synthesize a huge texture spanning the whole terrain. The low-frequency components of the GAN output are extracted, down-scaled and combined with the high-frequency components of the input texture during rendering. This results in a terrain texture that is both highly detailed and non-repetitive, which eliminates the tiling artifacts without decreasing overall image quality. The rendering is efficient regarding both memory consumption and computational costs. Furthermore, it is orthogonal to other techniques for terrain texture improvements such as texture splatting and can directly be combined with them.