Exemplar-based inpainting with rotation invariant patch matching

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to patch matching in exemplar-based inpainting. Our field of concern is movie restoration, particularly scratch concealment. Here we want to focus on a single frame (still image) inpainting. Exemplar-based approach uses patches from the known areas and copies their content to the damaged area. In case of irregular texture, there might be no patches available, so that the result would be visually acceptable. One way to increase the number of available patches is to rotate them. In most of the exemplar-based approaches, a target patch is not complete and a source patch has to be rotated and compared at every single angle. We overcome this inefficiency using a clue image, which comes from previous processing stages. We use moments of patches from this clue image, normalized to rotation, to reject apparently dissimilar patches, and to calculate the approximate angle of rotation, which has to be performed only once. In this paper, we provide justification for this simplification. We have no ambitions to provide a complete inpainting algorithm here.