Image processing using smooth ordering of its patches

We propose an image processing scheme based on reordering of its patches. For a given corrupted image, we extract all patches with overlaps, refer to these as coordinates in high-dimensional space, and order them such that they are chained in the "shortest possible path," essentially solving the traveling salesman problem. The obtained ordering applied to the corrupted image implies a permutation of the image pixels to what should be a regular signal. This enables us to obtain good recovery of the clean image by applying relatively simple one-dimensional smoothing operations (such as filtering or interpolation) to the reordered set of pixels. We explore the use of the proposed approach to image denoising and inpainting, and show promising results in both cases.