Image information restoration based on long-range correlation

A new class of image information restoration algorithms, virtually different from traditional techniques, is proposed. In comparison with other approaches, our methods use not only the information in local areas, but also that in the remote regions of the image. The methods originate from the idea that there exists abundant long-range correlation within natural images and the human vision system, composed of our eyes and brains, can sufficiently utilize such types of information redundancy to implement the functions of image interpretation, representation, restoration, enhancement and error concealment. Our general approach can be summarized as five basic steps: fetching, searching, matching, competing and recovering. The experimental results on several practical applications show that our methods perform substantially better than many other state-of-the-art methods