Combining anisotropic diffusion, transport equation and texture synthesis for inpainting textured images

• An innovative cartoon-driven filling approach and pixel sampling using local search.
• A new scheme based on transport equation to compute the pixel filling order.
• An isophote-based metric to measure the similarity between unfilled and candidate pixels.
• An efficient strategy to dynamically sample information while reducing the computational effort.

In this work we propose a new image inpainting technique that combines texture synthesis, anisotropic diffusion, transport equation and a new sampling mechanism designed to alleviate the computational burden of the inpainting process. Given an image to be inpainted, anisotropic diffusion is initially applied to generate a cartoon image. A block-based inpainting approach is then applied so that to combine the cartoon image and a measure based on transport equation that dictates the priority on which pixels are filled. A sampling region is then defined dynamically so as to hold the propagation of the edges towards image structures while avoiding unnecessary searches during the completion process. Finally, a cartoon-based metric is computed to measure likeness between target and candidate blocks. Experimental results and comparisons against existing techniques attest the good performance and flexibility of our technique when dealing with real and synthetic images.