A novel image inpainting method based on eight-direction symmetrical exemplars

A novel image inpainting method based on eight-direction symmetrical exemplars is proposed, which works with images where symmetry is present. And human-made and natural objects present several symmetries. The following three steps are the key of the method: firstly, according to the certain similarity criterion, we find the symmetrical exemplars of damaged region in eight directions. Secondly, we select the most similar symmetrical exemplar from eight symmetrical exemplars. Thirdly, we fill the damaged region in certain way using the most similar symmetrical exemplar. Our experiments show that results of image inpainting is good when missing regions of image have similar symmetry in any one of eight directions, and it is a single, efficient method.