Inpainting Strategies for Reconstruction of Missing Data in VHR Images

Missing data in very high spatial resolution (VHR) optical imagery take origin mainly from the acquisition conditions. Their accurate reconstruction represents a great methodological challenge because of the complexity and the ill-posed nature of the problem. In this letter, we present three different solutions, with all based on the inpainting approach, which consists in reconstructing the missing regions in a given image by propagating the spectrogeometrical information retrieved from the remaining parts of the image. They rely on the idea to enrich the patch search process by including local image properties or by isometric transformations or to reformulate it under a multiresolution processing scheme, respectively. Thorough experiments conducted on two different VHR images are reported and discussed. © 2011 IEEE.