Textures

Texture refers to the visual or tactile quality of a surface or the perceived surface characteristics in an image. It encompasses tactile textures, which can be felt, and visual textures, which are seen through patterns, granularity, or regularity.

In physical objects, texture arises from material composition, microstructure, and surface finishing. Rough textures feel coarse and irregular, while smooth textures feel even and slick. Natural textures include wood grain, stone, leather, and fabric weaves; manufactured textures include brushed metal, polished stone, and molded plastics.

In art and design, texture contributes to realism, depth, and material suggestion. Artists simulate texture with brushwork or stamping, while digital media use textures mapped onto surfaces to convey surface detail and material properties.

In computer graphics, a texture is a bitmap or image applied to a 3D surface via texture mapping. Textures increase detail without increasing geometry. Common types include diffuse (albedo) textures, normal maps that simulate small-scale relief, and maps for roughness, metallicity, specular reflection, emissive brightness, and height. Rendering often uses tiling, mipmapping for distance scaling, and filtering to reduce artifacts.

Texture analysis in image processing characterizes patterns by statistical or frequency-based measures. Features describe coarseness, contrast, regularity, and directionality. Methods include gray-level co-occurrence matrices (Haralick features) and Gabor filters to capture oriented textures.

Texture is a foundational concept across disciplines, informing aesthetics, user experience, and material science, and helping systems interpret visual information in images and 3D models.