How does Content-Aware fill work?

Question

In the upcoming version of Photoshop there is a feature called Content-Aware fill.

This feature will fill a selection of an image based on the surrounding image - to the

Answer 1

Well, they are not going to tell for the obvious reasons. The general name for the technique is "inpainting", you can look this up.

Specifically, if you look at what Criminisi did while in Microsoft http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.67.9407 and what Todor Georgiev does now at Adobe http://www.tgeorgiev.net/Inpainting.html, you'll be able to make a very good guess. A 90% guess, I'd say, which should be good enough.