Gradient based image completion by solving poisson equation

Abstract

Image completion is a method to fill the missing portions of an image caused by the removal of one or more foreground or background elements. In this paper a novel image completion algorithm is proposed for removing significant objects from natural images or photographs. The completion is realized in the following three steps. First, a gradient-based model is presented to determine the gradient-patch filling order. This step is critical because a better filling order can improve the continuation of image structures. Second, we implement the gradientpatch update strategy by measuring the exponential distance between the source patch and the target one in gradient domain. In order to find a better patch matching and propagating algorithm, we incorporate the gradient and color information together to determine the target patch. Third, a complete image is achieved by solving the Poisson equation with the updated image gradient map. Some experimental results on real-scene photographs are given to demonstrate both the efficiency and image equality of our novel method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.