1. An apparatus for recovering a pruned version of a picture in a video sequence, comprising: a divider for dividing said pruned version of said picture into a plurality of non-overlapping blocks; a metadata decoder for decoding metadata for use in recovering said pruned version of said picture; a patch library creator for creating a patch library from a reconstructed version of said picture, said patch library including a plurality of high resolution replacement patches for replacing said one or more pruned blocks during a recovery of said pruned version of said picture; and a search and replacement device for performing a searching process using said metadata to find a corresponding patch for a respective one of said one or more pruned blocks from among said plurality of non-overlapping blocks and replace said respective one of said one or more pruned blocks with said corresponding patch, wherein said signature is respectively created for each of said one or more pruned blocks, and said pruned version of said picture is recovered by comparing respective distance metrics from signatures for each of said plurality of high resolution patches to signatures for each of said one or more pruned blocks, sorting said respective distance metrics to obtain a rank list for each of said one or more pruned blocks, wherein a rank number in said rank list for a particular one of said one or more pruned blocks is used to retrieve a corresponding one of said plurality of high resolution patches in said patch library to be used to replace said particular one of said one or more pruned blocks, and wherein a patch dependency graph having a plurality of nodes and a plurality of edges is used to recover said pruned version of said picture, each of said plurality of nodes representing a respective one of said plurality of overlapping blocks, and each of said plurality of edges representing a respective dependency of at least said respective one of said plurality of overlapping blocks.