Fast image completion
Lin Yi · 2005
We propose a new algorithm that efficiently fills the unknown regions of an image caused by replacement or removal of part of the foreground. Previous approaches to inpainting and texture synthesis are either fast, but not applicable for small-scale regions, or slow, but fills large regions with good quality, but is slow. The algorithm in this paper is based on the patch-based best-fit searching strategy, in which a partly-known patch is filled by searching the known part of the image for a patch of pixels closely matching the known neighbors. This keeps the linear structure and texture of the image. We found that the exhaustive searching strategies used in previous work are the main source of inefficiency; most matches are located in the neighborhood of the target patch. Inspired by this spatial continuity, we introduce a more efficient searching strategy.