Image compression with structure-aware inpainting

This paper carves out a way to image compression that is motivated by the recent advancement in image inpainting. An image coding approach is proposed in which a number of regions of the input image are skipped at the encoder and are recovered through the inpainting process at the decoder. Furthermore, a structure-aware inpainting (SAI) method is developed to restore the skipped structural regions by taking advantage of the available portion of the decoded image. A binary structure map is extracted and compressed into the generated bit-stream to indicate the skipped regions with salient structures. By making use of the decoded texture information together with the structure map, the SAI method can recover the skipped structural regions as well as the non-structural ones effectively at the decoder. Compared with JPEG, our proposed image compression scheme allows smaller file, with the potential of up to 50% bit-saving capability, at similar visual quality levels.