Frozen-State Hierarchical Annealing

There is growing demand for methods to synthesize large images of porous media. Binary porous media generally contain structures with a wide range of scales. This poses difficulties for generating accurate samples using statistical techniques such as simulated annealing. Hierarchical methods have previously been found quite effective for such problems. In this paper, a frozen-state approach to hierarchical annealing is presented that offers over an order of magnitude reduction in computational complexity versus existing hierarchical techniques. Current limitations to this approach and areas of further research are discussed.