Image inpainting with salient structure completion and texture propagation

Image inpainting technique uses structural and textural information to repair or fill missing regions of a picture. Inspired by human visual characteristics, we introduce a new image inpainting approach which includes salient structure completion and texture propagation. In the salient structure completion step, incomplete salient structures are detected using wavelet transform, and completion order is determined through color texture and curvature features around the incomplete salient structures. Afterwards, curve fitting and extension are used to complete the incomplete salient structures. In the texture propagation step, the proposed approach first synthesizes texture information of completed salient structures. Then, the texture information is propagated into the remaining missing regions. A number of examples on real and synthetic images demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in removing occluding objects. Our results compare favorably to those obtained by existing greedy inpainting techniques.