To overcome the shortcomings of long time-consuming and low efficiency from the exemplar-based image inpainting algorithm proposed by Criminisi, an image inpainting algorithm was presented,in which the bilinear interpolation algorithm was used to downscale the original image and to improve inpainting efficiency.Firstly,the dimension of the original image was downscaled by a factor 0.2-0.5, then the inpainted point with the highest priority from a target region was evaluated and a best-exemplar was searched from the source region in the downscaled image.Furthermore, those counterparts were obtained by the proposed rules from the original image and were filled into the whole damaged region in the origin image.The above steps were iterated until the target regions were completely filled.Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed image inpainting algorithm can inhance 5-40 times the inpainting efficiency of the Criminisi’s, while good inpainting images are achieved.This method can obtain good inpainting results in efficiency and quality.