  With the explosive growth of web-based cameras and mobile devices, billions
of photographs are uploaded to the internet. We can trivially collect a huge
number of photo streams for various goals, such as 3D scene reconstruction and
other big data applications. However, this is not an easy task due to the fact
the retrieved photos are neither aligned nor calibrated. Furthermore, with the
occlusion of unexpected foreground objects like people, vehicles, it is even
more challenging to find feature correspondences and reconstruct realistic
scenes. In this paper, we propose a structure based image completion algorithm
for object removal that produces visually plausible content with consistent
structure and scene texture. We use an edge matching technique to infer the
potential structure of the unknown region. Driven by the estimated structure,
texture synthesis is performed automatically along the estimated curves. We
evaluate the proposed method on different types of images: from highly
structured indoor environment to the natural scenes. Our experimental results
demonstrate satisfactory performance that can be potentially used for
subsequent big data processing: 3D scene reconstruction and location
recognition.
