Fast Two-Step Exemplar-Based Image Inpainting

This paper presents a novel two-step examplar based image in painting approach. Firstly, a coarse version of the input image is acquired in a multi-resolution way through the Digital Wavelet Transform (DWT), and then based on this image, the original missing regions of the input image are in painted with the examplar-based method. In this in painted image, most of the structures and textures in the missing regions can be recovered, but some artifacts may exist in some certain areas that contain edges. To overcome this problem, the second pass of in painting is performed only in these areas. Compared with the existing examplar-based methods, a few new techniques, such as the dynamic search window and the patch structure distance test, are proposed to accelerate the best match searching process. It is shown by the experimental results that the proposed algorithm can achieve plausible results very close to those of the state-of-the-art approaches, but in a much faster way with lower computational cost.