Image coding based on patch-driven inpainting

Recent advances in capturing and display technologies, as well as the proliferation of platforms to share images on the Internet, will further increase the bandwidth and storage space required by image coding based applications. To reduce the image coding rate, some techniques taking into account the properties of the human visual system can be used. In this context, this paper proposes an inpainting based image codec which is able to improve the image compression efficiency. The proposed codec builds on top of the JPEG image coding standard and its rate-distortion performance is assessed using a novel methodology, particularly suitable for perceptual image codecs as the one proposed in this paper. According to this methodology, the proposed image codec allows a bitrate reduction of up to about 20% regarding the JPEG standard, at the same perceptual quality.