Multi-View Inpainting for Image-Based Scene Editing and Rendering

We propose a method to remove objects such as people and cars from multi-view urban image datasets, enabling free-viewpoint Image-Based Rendering (IBR) in the edited scenes. Our method combines information from multi-view 3D reconstruction with image inpainting techniques, by formulating the problem as an optimization of a global patch-based objective function. We use IBR techniques to reproject information from neighboring views, and 3D multi-view stereo reconstruction to perform multi-view coherent initialization for inpainting of pixels not filled by reprojection. Our algorithm performs multi-view consistent inpainting for color and 3D by blending reprojections with patch-based image inpainting. We run our algorithm on casually captured datasets, and Google Street View data, removing objects such as cars, people and pillars, showing that our approach produces results of sufficient quality for free-viewpoint IBR on ``cleaned up'' scenes, as well as IBR scene editing, such as limited displacement of real objects.

@InProceedings{TSPD16,
  author       = "Thonat, Theo and Shechtman, Eli and Paris, Sylvain and Drettakis, George",
  title        = "Multi-View Inpainting for Image-Based Scene Editing and Rendering",
  booktitle    = "International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV)",
  year         = "2016",
  url          = "http://www-sop.inria.fr/reves/Basilic/2016/TSPD16"
}