Video coding with spatio-temporal texture synthesis and edge-based inpainting

This paper proposes a video coding scheme, in which textural and structural regions are selectively removed in the encoder, and restored in the decoder by spatio-temporal texture synthesis and edge-based inpainting. In the proposed scheme, two types of regions are classified based on two motion models: local motion and global motion. In local motion regions, conventional block-based motion estimation is employed for region removal and spatio-temporal texture synthesis is applied for recovery of the removed regions. In global motion regions, edge-based image inpainting is utilized to recover removed regions, and sprite generation is used as an auxiliary tool to keep temporal consistency. In the proposed scheme, both structures and textures are handled and some kinds of assistant information which can guide restoration are extracted and coded. This approach is blockbased and thus is flexible and generic to be implemented into standard-compliant video coding schemes. It has been implemented into H.264/AVC and achieves up to 35% bitrate saving at similar visual quality levels compared with H.264/AVC without our approach.