A Hierarchical Search Space Refinement and Filling for Exemplar based Image Inpainting

Abstract

There are many real world scenarios where a portion of the image is damaged or lost. Restoring such an image without prior knowledge or a reference image is a difficult task. Image inpainting is a method that focuses on reconstructing the damaged or missing portion of images based on the information available from undamaged areas of the same image. The existing methods fill the missing area from the boundary. Their performance varies while reconstructing structures and textures and many of them restrict the size of the area to be inpainted. In this paper exemplar based inpainting is adopted in a hierarchical framework. A hierarchical search space refinement and hierarchical filling are proposed in this paper which increases the accuracy and handles the extra cost due to multi resolution processing in a better way. The former tries to select an exemplar suitable at all resolution levels restricting the search space from the lower resolution level. The later fills the region at lower resolution level whose results are taken to the higher levels. This makes the non boundary pixels known in the higher resolution level which in turn helps in search space refinement while increasing accuracy.