MULTIORIENTATION-BASED MULTISTRUCTURE MORPHOLOGICAL INPAINTING

Abstract

A multiorientation-based multistructure morphological inpainting for the recovery of damaged digitized photographs is proposed. As the inpainting order plays a vital role for human visualization, the method is guided by the orientation of edges at the surrounding known regions of the missing (spoiled) domain. The damaged picture is decomposed into its constituent orientation subbands by steerable filters. The subband information is used for reconstructing the regions within the missing part at a particular orientation, as well as for guiding the integration of the reconstructed regions. Subbands having response at the boundary of the missing domain are named as constructive subbands. The damaged regions are morphologically eroded using the structuring elements of corresponding orientations that of the constructive subbands. The resultant image is obtained using winner-takes-all integration. 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 integration process to guarantee complete and natural look. Implementation of region-filling through morphological erosion, a noniterative and nonsampling process, makes the method faster than many other traditional texture synthesis inpainting algorithms and it successfully recovers images with better peak signal to noise ratios and structural similarity index even for massive damages.