Image completion algorithm based on texture synthesis

A new algorithm is proposed for completing the missing parts caused by the removal of foreground or background elements from an image of natural scenery in a visually plausible way. The major contributions of the proposed algorithm are: (1) for most natural images, there is a strong orientation of texture or color distribution. So a method is introduced to compute the main direction of the texture and complete the image by limiting the search to one direction to carry out image completion quite fast; (2) there exists a synthesis ordering for image completion. The searching order of the patches is defined to ensure the regions with more known information and the structures should be completed before filling in other regions; (3) to improve the visual effect of texture synthesis, an adaptive scheme is presented to determine the size of the template window for capturing the features of various scales. A number of examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.