Structure-aware image inpainting using patch scale optimization

•Local structure multiplier in the priority function ensures the structure continuity.•Color and space distance take into consideration in path searching process.•Find the patch with optimized scale between under each candidate scale.

Image inpainting is widely used in many image processing applications such as image stitching, image editing and object removal. The main challenge stems from producing visually plausible results after reconstruction. Most of the image inpainting algorithms cannot maintain structure continuity and texture consistency precisely. To address this problem, we propose a robust exemplar-based inpainting algorithm. Firstly, we present local structure multiplier to contain sufficient structure information in the priority function which ensures the structure continuity. Secondly, we combine color feature and space distance between two patches to search for the optimized patch to avoid texture inconsistency. At last, we calculate the average pixel difference between two patches under each candidate scale, we select the scale which the minimal average pixel difference is to be the optimized scale. We copy the target patch with the optimized patch. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed method.