Summary
Texture synthesis is a fascinating area of research and most approaches can generally be divided into two types. Parametric and non-parametric. In short, the parametric approach tries to create a mathematical model based on some input (texture exemplar) and then using the model to create new synthesized textures. Non-parametric is quite a wide term, but these approaches often boils down to short cutting the mathematical model creation step and instead stitches together new textures by reusing data directly from the input (texture exemplar).