Laplacian Patch-Based Image Synthesis

Joo Ho Lee, Inchang Choi, Min H. Kim; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016, pp. 2727-2735

Patch-based image synthesis has been enriched with global optimization on the image pyramid. Successively, the gradient-based synthesis has improved structural coherence and details. However, the gradient operator is directional and inconsistent and requires computing multiple operators. It also introduces a significantly heavy computational burden to solve the Poisson equation that often accompanies artifacts in non-integrable gradient fields. In this paper, we propose a patch-based synthesis using a Laplacian pyramid to improve searching correspondence with enhanced awareness of edge structures. Contrary to the gradient operators, the Laplacian pyramid has the advantage of being isotropic in detecting changes to provide more consistent performance in decomposing the base structure and the detailed localization. Furthermore, it does not require heavy computation as it employs approximation by the differences of Gaussians. We examine the potentials of the Laplacian pyramid for enhanced edge-aware correspondence search. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the Laplacian-based approach over the state-of-the-art patch-based image synthesis methods.