Image completion using image skimming

This paper is concerned with the problem of image completion where the goal is to fill large missing parts (holes) in an image, video or a scene in a visually-plausible and a computationally-efficient manner. Recently, the literature on hole filling was dominated by exemplar-based (patch-based) filling techniques with a two-stage unified pipeline that starts by building a bag of significant patches (BoSP), and then uses that bag to fill the hole. In this paper, we propose a new framework which addresses the inherent limitations of the state-of-the-art techniques. Our method capitalizes on a newly-developed technique for image skimming, followed by a novel procedure to propagate the constructed skim to within the hole. Experimental results show that our method compares favourably with the state-of-the-art.