Large block inpainting by color continuation analysis

Automatic inpainting is a mechanism which repairs damaged pictures using an approximation mechanism. The most difficult problem is to inpaint a large damaged area, without knowing its content. One possible solution is to use color interpolation or extrapolation on surrounding pixels. However, spatial characteristics such as edges and pixel continuations are hard to be restored. In this research, we propose a series of automatic algorithms, which is based on an analysis of color continuations. Large damaged blocks are repaired, before the rest smaller potions are repaired by a multiresolution inpainting algorithm. The mechanism is tested on more than 2000 images, including cartoon drawing, photos, Chinese painting, and western painting. Our results prove that, the proposed automatic mechanism fixes damaged image up to a certain degree of satisfaction from the users. The demonstration of our work is available at: http://www.mine.tku.edu.tw/demos/inpaint.