SVD Based Automatic Detection of Target Regions for Image Inpainting

We are often required to retouch images in order to improve their visual appearance, by removing the visual discontinuities like breaks and damaged regions. Such retouching of images may be achieved by inpainting. Current techniques for image inpainting require the user to manually select the target regions to be inpainted. Very few techniques for automatically detecting the target regions for inpainting are reported in the literature, which are suitable to detect an actual damage or alteration to the given photograph. In this paper, we propose a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based novel technique for automatic detection of the damaged regions in the photographed object / scene, for the purpose of digitally restoring them to their entirety using inpainting. Results on an exhaustive set of images suggest that the mask generated using the proposed technique can be suitably used for inpainting purpose to digitally restore the given images.