Image Completion with Structure Propagation

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to image com- pletion, which we call structure propagation. In our system, the user manually specifies important missing structure in- formation by extending a few curves or line segments from the known to the unknown regions. Our approach synthe- sizes image patches along these user-specified curves in the unknown region using patches selected around the curves in the known region. Structure propagation is formulated as a global optimization problem by enforcing structure and consistency constraints. If only a single curve is specified, structure propagation is solved using Dynamic Program- ming. When multiple intersecting curves are specified, we adopt the Belief Propagation algorithm to find the optimal patches. After completing structure propagation, we fill in the remaining unknown regions using patch-based texture synthesis. We show that our approach works well on a num- ber of examples that are challenging to state-of-the-art tech- niques.