Left: An 1865 Photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken by Alexander Gardner. Right: Image restored with our algorithm. The inpainting time took about half of a second.

Manuel M. Oliveira, Brian Bowen, Richard McKenna, and Yu-Sung Chang

Department of Computer Science, State University of New York at Stony Brook

Proceedings of the International Conference on Visualization, Imaging and Image Processing, Marbella, Spain. September 3-5, 2001, pp. 261-266

Reconstruction of missing or damaged portions of images is an ancient practice used extensively in artwork restoration. Recently, a few digital inpainting models based on the use of partial differential equations have been proposed. Unfortunately, these algorithms are computationally expensive, usually taking a few minutes to restore small portions of an image, which makes them inappropriate for interactive applications. We discuss the causes of inefficiency of these algorithms and present a simple inpainting model that is two to three orders of magnitude faster, while producing results comparable the ones obtained with current methods.

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