title: Finding repeating patterns/images in images
body: <p>I've been looking around for some papers (or info) on this topic.</p>
  
  <p>To avoid a misunderstanding: I'm not talking about finding a supplied pattern in multiple locations.</p>
  
  <p>Repeating patterns can also be understood to mean repeating images.  The definition of pattern here isn't abstract.  Imagine, for instance, a brick wall.  The wall is composed of individual bricks.  A picture of the wall is composed of the repeating image of a brick.</p>
  
  <p>The solution must preferably find the largest repeating pattern.  Large in this context can be defined two ways: pixel area or number of repetitions.  </p>
  
  <p>In the above example, you can cut the bricks in half.  In order to make a brick, you can rotate a segment and attach the halves.  While the complete brick is the largest repeating image in terms of pixel area, there are 2x more repetitions of half blocks.</p>
  
  <p>Any thoughts?</p>