Prior and macro-filling order for image completion

This paper introduces an algorithm to build priors that help image completion to produce better and visually plausible results. The goal of the prior is to seamlessly reconstruct long edges, that exemplar-based inpainting fails to restore. The prior consists in locating the edges across the missing region, and separating the image in regions of relative similar textures. Unlike other techniques, our proposal does not use segmentation or inpainting to obtain the prior, providing a fast technique. Moreover, the technique does not rely on an image dependent threshold. Finally, we propose a scheduling for the synthesis of the missing region based on the prior and Criminisi´s algorithm. The scheduling may be thought as a novel macro-filling order for exemplar-based synthesis. The results are comparable with recent and more complex proposals based on super-resolution or Photoshop. Finally, we emphasize that, our prior is not dedicated to our image completion algorithm, and can be used to drive other image completion or inpainting algorithms.