Fast Orientation-Driven Multi-Structure Morphological Inpainting

Abstract

A fast inpainting algorithm for restoring damaged digitized photographs based on orientation-driven multistructure morphology is proposed. The inpainting is guided by the orientation of the edges at the known surrounding regions of the missing domain. The edges are grouped with respect to their orientation by compass operators. Each edge group is represented as separate plane. The edge-plane information is used twice manifold for reconstructing the regions within the missing part, as well as for guiding the integration that follows. The damaged regions are morphologically eroded using the structuring elements of corresponding orientations dictated by the edge planes. Simultaneously, the edge planes are interpolated. The resultant image is obtained by integrating the eroded images with reference to the interpolated edge planes. The novelty of our approach is to explicitly specify the direction of filling thereby ensuring ease in convergence in different orientations and then streamlining the process to guarantee complete and natural look. By implementing region-filling through morphological erosion, a non-iterative and non-sampling process makes the method faster than many traditional texture synthesis inpainting algorithms and successfully recovers images with better peak signal-to-noise ratios even for massive damages.