Fast Exemplar-Based Image Inpainting Using a New Pruning Technique

This paper presents a new algorithm for fast exemplar-based image inpainting by using image pyramid and a novel pruning scheme. The proposed technique separates the inpainting process into three major steps. First the model determines which patch belonging to the inpainting region should be filled first. Then the pruning system analyzes the selected patch and weeds out regions having no chance to be the best matching patch. Finally, it performs a fast texture synthesis based on greedy search method in the remaining regions to fill the selected patch. Compared with previous methods, the proposed algorithm is much more efficient computationally. Experiments on synthetic and natural images show the advantages of the proposed algorithm, where it is shown to compare favorably with contemporary state-of-the-art schemes.