A novel image inpainting framework based on multilevel image pyramids

Image inpainting is the art of manipulating an image so that it is visually unrecognizable way. A considerable amount of research has been done in this area over the last few years. However, the state of art techniques does suffer from computational complexities and plausible results. This paper proposes a multi-level image pyramid-based image inpainting algorithm. The image inpainting algorithm starts with the coarsest level of the image pyramid and overpainting information is transferred to the subsequent levels until the bottom level gets inpainted. The search strategy used in the algorithm is based on hashing the coherent information in an image which makes the search fast and accurate. Also, the search space is constrained based on the propagated information thereby reducing the complexity of the algorithm. Compared to other inpainting methods; the proposed algorithm inpaints the target region with better plausibility and human vision conformation. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves better results as compared to other inpainting techniques.