Combined Structure and Texture Image Inpainting Algorithm for Natural Scene Image Completion

Abstract

Image inpainting or image completion refers to the task of filling in the missing or damaged regions of an image in a visually plausible way. Many works on this subject have been proposed these recent years. We present a hybrid method for completion of images of natural scenery, where the removal of a foreground object creates a hole in the image. The basic idea is to decompose the original image into a structure and a texture image. Reconstruction of each image is performed separately. The missing information in the structure component is reconstructed using a structure inpainting algorithm, while the texture component is repaired by an improved exemplar based texture synthesis technique. Taking advantage of both the structure inpainting methods and texture synthesis techniques, we designed an effective image reconstruction method. A comparison with some existing methods on different natural images shows the merits of our proposed approach in providing high quality inpainted images.

Keywords: Image inpainting, Decomposition method, Structure inpainting, Exemplar based, Texture synthesis