Interactive image inpainting using DCT based exemplar matching

Abstract

We present a novel algorithm of exemplar-based image inpainting which can achieve an interactive response and generate results with good quality. In this paper, we modify exemplar-based method with the use of Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) for the strategy of exemplar matching. We decompose exemplars by DCT and evaluate the matching score with fewer coefficients, which is unprecedented in image inpainting. The reason why using fewer coefficients is so important is that the efficiency of Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search drops significantly when using high dimensions. We have also developed a local gradient-based filling algorithm to complete the image blocks with unknown pixels so that the ANN search can be adopted to speed up the matching while preserving the continuity of image. Experimental results prove the advantage of this proposed method. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.