NCA: Texture Generation with Ultra-Compact Neural Cellular Automata

A Mordvintsev, E Niklasson�- arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.13545, 2021 - arxiv.org
arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.13545, 2021arxiv.org
We study the problem of example-based procedural texture synthesis using highly compact
models. Given a sample image, we use differentiable programming to train a generative
process, parameterised by a recurrent Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) rule. Contrary to the
common belief that neural networks should be significantly over-parameterised, we
demonstrate that our model architecture and training procedure allows for representing
complex texture patterns using just a few hundred learned parameters, making their�…
We study the problem of example-based procedural texture synthesis using highly compact models. Given a sample image, we use differentiable programming to train a generative process, parameterised by a recurrent Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) rule. Contrary to the common belief that neural networks should be significantly over-parameterised, we demonstrate that our model architecture and training procedure allows for representing complex texture patterns using just a few hundred learned parameters, making their expressivity comparable to hand-engineered procedural texture generating programs. The smallest models from the proposed NCA family scale down to 68 parameters. When using quantisation to one byte per parameter, proposed models can be shrunk to a size range between 588 and 68 bytes. Implementation of a texture generator that uses these parameters to produce images is possible with just a few lines of GLSL or C code.
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