Seasonal terrain texture synthesis via Köppen periodic conditioning

This paper presents the first method for synthesizing seasonal transition of terrain textures for an input heightfield. Our method reproduces a seamless transition of terrain textures according to the seasons by learning measured data on the earth using a convolutional neural network. We attribute the main seasonal texture transition to vegetation and snow, and control the texture synthesis not only with the input heightfield but also with the annual temperature and precipitation based on Köppen’s climate classification as well as insolation at the location. We found that month-by-month synthesis yields incoherent transitions, while a naïve conditioning with explicit temporal information (e.g., month) degrades generalizability due to the north–south hemisphere difference. To address these issues, we introduce a simple solution—periodic conditioning on the annual data without explicit temporal information. Our experiments reveal that our method can synthesize plausible seasonal transitions of terrain textures. We also demonstrate large-scale texture synthesis by tiling the texture output.