Inpainting images with curvilinear structures propagation

Inpainting images with smooth curvilinear structures interrupted is a challenging problem, because the structures are salient features sensitive to the human vision system and they are not easy to be completed in a visually pleasing way, especially when gaps are large. In this paper, we propose an approach to address this problem. A curve with a desired nice shape is first created to smoothly extend the missing structure from the known to unknown regions. As the curve partitions the unknown region into separate areas, textures can be filled independently into each area. We then adopt a patch-based texture inpainting method enhanced by a novel similarity measurement of patches. After that, very abrupt edges caused by different inpainted colours on their two sides need to be smoothed for natural colour transition across the curve. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.