Image de-fencing framework with hybrid inpainting algorithm

Detection and removal of fences from digital images becomes essential when an important part of the scene turns to be occluded by such unwanted structures. Image de-fencing is challenging because manually marking fence boundaries is tedious and time consuming. The fence is a distributed object and may cover a significant portion of the scene. In this paper a novel image de-fencing algorithm that e↵ectively detects and removes fences with minimal user input is presented. The user is only requested to mark few fence pixels; then, color models are estimated and used to train Bayes classifier to segment the fence and the background. Finally, the fence mask is refined exploiting connected component analysis and morphological operators. To restore the occluded region a hybrid inpainting algorithm is proposed that integrates exemplar-based technique with a pyramid based interpolation approach. In contrast to previous solutions which work only for regular pattern fences, the proposed technique is able to remove both regular and irregular fences. A large number of experiments are carried out on a wide variety of images containing di↵erent types of fences demonstrating the e↵ectiveness of the proposed approach. The proposed approach is also compared with state-of-the-art image de-fencing and inpainting techniques and showed convincing results. M.S. Farid ( ) · M. Grangetto Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Torino, Torino, Italy E-mail: [email protected] M.S. Farid Punjab University College of Information Technology, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan A. Mahmood School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Western Australia, Australia