Inpainting

Inpainting is the process of reconstructing lost or deteriorated parts of images and videos. In the museum world, in the case of a valuable painting, this task would be carried out by a skilled art conservator or art restorer. In the digital world, inpainting (also known as image interpolation or video interpolation) refers to the application of sophisticated algorithms to replace lost or corrupted parts of the image data (mainly small regions or to remove small defects).

There are many objectives and applications of this technique.

In photography and cinema, is used for film restoration; to reverse the deterioration (e.g., cracks in photographs or scratches and dust spots in film; see infrared cleaning). It is also used for removing red-eye, the stamped date from photographs and removing objects to creative effect.

This technique can be used to replace the lost blocks in the coding and transmission of images, for example, in a streaming video. It can also be used to remove logos in videos.

Inpainting is rooted in the restoration of images. Traditionally, inpainting has been done by professional restorers. The underlying methodology of their work is as follows:

Since the wide applications of digital camera and the digitalization of old photos, inpainting has become an automatic process that is performed on digital images. More than scratch removing, the inpainting techniques are also applied to object removal, text removal and other automatic modifications of images and videos. Furthermore, they can also be observed in applications like image compression and super resolution. Mainly three groups of 2D image inpainting algorithms can be found in literature. The first one to be noted is structural inpainting, the second one is texture inpainting and the last one is a combination of these two techniques. All these inpainting methods have one thing in common - they use the information of the known or undestroyed image areas in order to fill the gap.

Structural inpainting uses geometric approaches for filling in the missing information in the region which should be inpainted. These algorithms focus on the consistency of the geometric structure.

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Wikipedia