# On Synthetic Texture Datasets: Challenges, Creation, and Curation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.10297 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10297/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [SinGAN: Learning a Generative Model from a Single Natural Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01164/) (2019)
- [Red-Teaming the Stable Diffusion Safety Filter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04610/) (2022)
- [Text2Tex: Text-driven Texture Synthesis via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11396/) (2023)
- [Precomputed Real-Time Texture Synthesis with Markovian Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04382/) (2016)
- [Texture Networks: Feed-forward Synthesis of Textures and Stylized Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03417/) (2016)
- [Building a Large Scale Dataset for Image Emotion Recognition: The Fine Print and The Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.02677/) (2016)
- [Non-Stationary Texture Synthesis by Adversarial Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04487/) (2018)
- [Learning Texture Manifolds with the Periodic Spatial GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06566/) (2017)
- [SeamlessGAN: Self-Supervised Synthesis of Tileable Texture Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05120/) (2022)
- [Practical No-box Adversarial Attacks with Training-free Hybrid Image Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04607/) (2022)
- [Texture Synthesis Using Shallow Convolutional Networks with Random Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00021/) (2016)
- [Explorations in Texture Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09543/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The influence of textures on machine learning models has been an ongoing investigation, specifically in texture bias/learning, interpretability, and robustness. However, due to the lack of large and diverse texture data available, the findings in these works have been limited, as more comprehensive evaluations have not been feasible. Image generative models are able to provide data creation at scale, but utilizing these models for texture synthesis has been unexplored and poses additional challenges both in creating accurate texture images and validating those images. In this work, we introduce an extensible methodology and corresponding new dataset for generating high-quality, diverse texture images capable of supporting a broad set of texture-based tasks. Our pipeline consists of: (1) developing prompts from a range of descriptors to serve as input to text-to-image models, (2) adopting and adapting Stable Diffusion pipelines to generate and filter the corresponding images, and (3) further filtering down to the highest quality images. Through this, we create the Prompted Textures Dataset (PTD), a dataset of 246,285 texture images that span 56 textures. During the process of generating images, we find that NSFW safety filters in image generation pipelines are highly sensitive to texture (and flag up to 60% of our texture images), uncovering a potential bias in these models and presenting unique challenges when working with texture data. Through both standard metrics and a human evaluation, we find that our dataset is high quality and diverse. Our dataset is available for download at https://zenodo.org/records/15359142.