I know the title of this post may not inspire you to read on, but this is the title of a paper by some clever folk at Princeton who’ve been working on some amazing new image editing tools. Any of you that are using Photoshop CS4 may have played with the new content aware scaling feature that allows you to intelligently stretch and squish some parts of and image while keeping other parts the same and blending it all together for you. If you haven’t seen this nifty feature you can see it in action in the video below:

The team behind PatchMatch at Princeton have taken the whole thing a step further and created some clever code that has a lot more flexibility over how you constrain the scaling and can almost completely rebuild parts of an image or missing parts of a subject (in the video they restore the Parthenon). What’s more is that they claim it’s significantly faster than current algorithms.
If you’re interested to see what will probably be a part of Photoshop in years to come, head over here to watch a video of their tools in action.