Video object inpainting using posture mapping

This paper presents a novel framework for object-based video inpainting. To complete an occluded object, our method first samples a 3-D volume of the video into directional spatio-temporal slices, and then performs patch-based image inpainting to repair the partially damaged object trajectories in the 2-D slices. The completed slices are subsequently combined to obtain a sequence of virtual contours of the damaged object. The virtual contours and a posture sequence retrieval technique are then used to retrieve the most similar sequence of object postures in the available non-occluded postures. Key-posture selection and indexing are performed to reduce the complexity of posture sequence retrieval. We also propose a synthetic posture generation scheme that enriches the collection of key-postures so as to reduce the effect of insufficient key-postures. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can maintain the spatial consistency and temporal motion continuity of an object simultaneously.