Inpainting large missing regions based on Seam Carving

Abstract

Inpainting techniques are developed to recover missing image information. Existing inpainting approaches are: Partial Differential Equations Based Inpainting (PDE-BI) and Exemplar-Based Inpainting (EBI). PDE-BI methods used to fill in the missing information via information propagation from neighbouring areas. However, it can only reconstruct successfully small missing regions that are surrounded by limited texture. However, EBI methods are used to recover large regions with richly-textured/structured areas around them, moreover, artefacts are likely to occur. This paper proposes a technique to reduce the missing region size based on seam carving approach, which enables EBI and PDE-BI to recover the missing part. In our proposal, seam carving is used to reduce only the size of the missing region, to be subsequently recovered using EBI method. The added extra paths resulting from the added seams is repaired using PDE-BI. This method outperformed the state-of-art EBI methods.

Keywords

• seam carving
• exemplar-based inpainting
• partial differential equation-based inpainting methods
• energy function