PatchNet: a patch-based image representation for interactive library-driven image editing

We introduce PatchNets, a compact, hierarchical representation describing structural and appearance characteristics of image regions, for use in image editing. In a PatchNet, an image region with coherent appearance is summarized by a graph node, associated with a single representative patch, while geometric relationships between different regions are encoded by labelled graph edges giving contextual information. The hierarchical structure of a PatchNet allows a coarse-to-fine description of the image. We show how this PatchNet representation can be used as a basis for interactive, library-driven, image editing. The user draws rough sketches to quickly specify editing constraints for the target image. The system then automatically queries an image library to find semantically-compatible candidate regions to meet the editing goal. Contextual image matching is performed using the PatchNet representation, allowing suitable regions to be found and applied in a few seconds, even from a library containing thousands of images.