A novel texture synthesis based algorithm for object removal in photographs

Abstract

Natural images and photographs sometimes may contain stains or undesired objects covering significant portions of the images. Inpainting is a method to fill in such portions using the information from the remaining area of the image. In this paper, we propose a novel photograph editing framework that utilizes texture synthesis techniques. Major contributions of our algorithm are: 1) a constraint-based candidate patch searching method which limits the searching within neighboring region with similar texture; 2) a metric of Coherence Confidence for selecting the best fit candidate preventing error accumulation and propagation; 3) integration of graphcut optimization to make the seam visually invisible. Experiments show that our system can efficiently handle different cases especially large regions in complex background. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.