Mine is "Image Quilting for Texture Synthesis and Transfer" by Efros and Freeman. It's simple enough to implement as a personal project and has some nice visual output. Plus, Wang tiles are cool and it's fun to learn more about them.
On the same subject, I prefer the concurrently published "Image Analogies" paper ( http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/projects/image-analogies/ ) because their described technique, while slow, just makes so much sense.
https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/vision/p...