Needle-Match: Reliable Patch Matching under High Uncertainty

Reliable patch-matching forms the basis for many algorithms (super-resolution, denoising, inpainting, etc.) However, when the image quality deteriorates (by noise, blur or geometric distortions), the reliability of patch-matching deteriorates as well. Matched patches in the degraded image, do not necessarily imply similarity of the underlying patches in the (unknown) high-quality image. This restricts the applicability of patch-based methods. In this paper we present a patch representation called "Needle", which consists of small multi-scale versions of the patch and its immediate surrounding region. While the patch at the finest image scale is severely degraded, the degradation decreases dramatically in coarser needle scales, revealing reliable information for matching. We show that the Needle is robust to many types of image degradations, leads to matches faithful to the underlying high-quality patches, and to improvement in existing patch-based methods.