  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 image clustering, 3D scene
reconstruction, and other big data applications. However, such tasks are not
easy due to the fact the retrieved photos can have large variations in their
view perspectives, resolutions, lighting, noises, and distortions.
Fur-thermore, with the occlusion of unexpected objects like people, vehicles,
it is even more challenging to find feature correspondences and reconstruct
re-alistic 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 natural scenes. Our experimental
results demonstrate satisfactory performance that can be potentially used for
subsequent big data processing, such as image localization, object retrieval,
and scene reconstruction. Our experiments show that this approach achieves
favorable results that outperform existing state-of-the-art techniques.
