Image restoration using digital inpainting and noise removal

Inpainting and denoising are two important tasks in the field of image processing with broad applications in image and vision analysis. In this paper, we present a new approach for image restoration. Our method simultaneously fills in missing, corrupted, or undesirable information while it removes noise. The denoising is performed by the smoothing equation working inside and outside of the inpainting domain but in completely different ways. Inside the inpainting domain, the smoothing is carried out by the Mean Curvature Flow, while the smoothing of the outside of the inpainting domain is carried out in a way as to encourage smoothing within a region and discourage smoothing across boundaries. Besides smoothing, the approach here presented permits the transportation of available information from the outside towards the inside of the inpainting domain. This combination permits the simultaneous use of filling-in and differentiated smoothing of different regions of an image. The experimental results show the effective performance of the combination of these two procedures in restoring scratched photos, disocclusion (or removal of entire objects from the image) in vision analysis and text removal from images. q 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.