Combined Structure and Texture Image Inpainting Algorithm for Natural Scene Image Completion

Image inpainting or image completion refers to the task of filling in the missing or damaged regions o f an image in a visually plausible way. Many works on this sub ject have been proposed these recent years. We pres ent a hybrid method for completion of images of natural s cenery, where the removal of a foreground object cr eates a hole in the image. The basic idea is to decompose t he original image into a structure and a texture im age. Reconstruction of each image is performed separatel y. The missing information in the structure compone nt is reconstructed using a structure inpainting algorith m, while the texture component is repaired by an im proved exemplar based texture synthesis technique. Taking advantage of both the structure inpainting methods and texture synthesis techniques, we designed an effect ive image reconstruction method. A comparison with some existing methods on different natural images shows the merits of our proposed approach in providing hi gh quality inpainted images.