Structure Preserving Large Imagery Reconstruction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a structure-preserving image completion method for object removal in large, diverse imagery, enabling realistic scene reconstruction by inferring and synthesizing missing structures and textures.

Contribution

It proposes a novel structure-based image completion algorithm that infers scene structure and synthesizes textures, outperforming existing methods in diverse environments.

Findings

Effective in both indoor and natural scenes

Produces visually plausible and consistent results

Outperforms state-of-the-art techniques

Abstract

With the explosive growth of web-based cameras and mobile devices, billions of photographs are uploaded to the internet. We can trivially collect a huge number of photo streams for various goals, such as image clustering, 3D scene reconstruction, and other big data applications. However, such tasks are not easy due to the fact the retrieved photos can have large variations in their view perspectives, resolutions, lighting, noises, and distortions. Fur-thermore, with the occlusion of unexpected objects like people, vehicles, it is even more challenging to find feature correspondences and reconstruct re-alistic scenes. In this paper, we propose a structure-based image completion algorithm for object removal that produces visually plausible content with consistent structure and scene texture. We use an edge matching technique to infer the potential structure of the unknown region. Driven by the estimated structure, texture synthesis is performed automatically along the estimated curves. We evaluate the proposed method on different types of images: from highly structured indoor environment to natural scenes. Our experimental results demonstrate satisfactory performance that can be potentially used for subsequent big data processing, such as image localization, object retrieval, and scene reconstruction. Our experiments show that this approach achieves favorable results that outperform existing state-of-the-art techniques.