sample texton map is needed however this complete search procedure is relatively slow unfortunately while any of a number of conventional acceleration methods used for two dimensional texture synthesis such as for example the well known k d tree and tree structured vector quantization tsvq can be used to improve the performance of the btf synthesizer such conventional techniques are still too slow consequently in one embodiment a search method termed a u201c k coherence u201d search is used for dramatically speeding up the btf synthesis described herein the basic idea of k coherence search is that only u201c good u201d candidate pixels are searched in the sample texton map thereby dramatically limiting the potential search space while providing a corresponding increase in overall system performance u201c good u201d candidate pixels are defined as those pixels where the distance between the candidate 39 s neighborhood and vertex 39 s neighborhood is sufficiently small the general system diagram of fig2 illustrates the processes generally described above in particular the system diagram of fig2 illustrates interrelationships between program modules for implementing a u201c btf synthesizer u201d for synthesizing a btf on an arbitrary surface given a sample btf as an input it should be noted that the boxes and interconnections between boxes that are represented by broken or dashed lines in fig2 represent alternate embodiments of the btf synthesizer and that any or all of these alternate embodiments as described below may be used in combination with other alternate embodiments that are described throughout this document in general as illustrated by fig2 a system and method for synthesizing a btf on an arbitrary surface begins by providing a sample btf 200 to a texton.