We present a novel formulation of exemplar-based inpainting as a global energy optimization problem, written in terms of the offset map. The proposed energy function combines a data attachment term that ensures the continuity of reconstruction at the boundary of the inpainting domain with a smoothness term that ensures a visually coherent reconstruction inside the hole. This formulation is adapted to obtain a global minimum using the graph cuts algorithm. To reduce the computational complexity, we propose an efficient multiscale graph cuts algorithm. To compensate the loss of information at low resolution levels, we use a feature representation computed at the original image resolution. This permits alleviation of the ambiguity induced by comparing only color information when the image is represented at low resolution levels. Our experiments show how well the proposed algorithm performs compared with other recent algorithms.