Texel (graphics)

Voronoi polygons for a group of texels.
Voronoi polygons for a group of texels

In computer graphics, a texel, texture element, or texture pixel is the fundamental unit of a texture map.[1] Textures are represented by arrays of texels representing the texture space, just as other images are represented by arrays of pixels.

Texels can also be described by image regions that are obtained through simple procedures such as thresholding. Voronoi tesselation can be used to define their spatial relationships—divisions are made at the midpoints between the centroids of each texel and the centroids of every surrounding texel for the entire texture. This results in each texel centroid having a Voronoi polygon surrounding it, which consists of all points that are closer to its own texel centroid than any other centroid.[2]

  1. ^ Andrew Glassner, An Introduction to Ray Tracing, San Francisco: Morgan–Kaufmann, 1989. ISBN 978-0122861604
  2. ^ Linda G. Shapiro and George C. Stockman, Computer Vision, Upper Saddle River: Prentice–Hall, 2001. ISBN 978-0130307965