Spatial Patch Blending for Artefact Reduction in Pattern-Based Inpainting Techniques

Patch-based (or “pattern-based”) inpainting, is a popular processing technique aiming at reconstructing missing regions in images, by iteratively duplicating blocks of known image data (patches) inside the area to fill in. This kind of method is particularly effective to process wide image areas, thanks to its ability to reconstruct textured data. Nevertheless, “pathological” geometric configurations often happen, leading to visible reconstruction artifacts on inpainted images, whathever the chosen pattern-based inpainting algorithm. In this paper we focus on these problematic cases and propose a generic spatial-blending technique that can be adapted to any type of patch-based inpainting methods in order to reduce theses problematic artefacts.