A Simple U-Diffusion Inpainting Structure

The inpainting problem is addressed in this work through a very simplified version of the approach based on low-dimensional manifold model (LDMM), in which the actual working principle of the LDMM is put into evidence, namely, the simulated diffusion of image pixels that takes place in a manifold from which patches are drawn to form a given image. The simplicity of this principle is translated into a straightforward algorithm that borrows ideas from the Locally Linear Embedding (LLE) method. The equivalence between this much simpler algorithm and the LDMM is illustrated through visual inspection and experimental measurements of peak signal-to-noise ratios. Additionally, a (U-shaped) multi-scale use of the proposed algorithm is presented as a significantly better initializer for missing pixels, thus reducing the number of algorithmic iterations.