Photoshop Healing Brush: a Tool for Seamless Cloning

The Healing Brush is a tool first introduced in Photoshop, that achieves seamless removal of defects in images. A similar image processing algorithm, called Poisson Editing, was later proposed in [8]. Our paper presents the theoretical ideas on which Healing is based, as well as some implementational details. Healing is performed by constructing iterative solutions to a fourth order partial differential equation. Its solutions follow the spatial variations between pixels in a sampled area, while at the same time are continuous and have continuous derivatives at the boundary. Poisson Editing is only continuous at the boundary. Also, our exact equation describes cloning of features from one image to another with greater fidelity. Our mathematical understanding of the process is based on viewing the image as a section in a fibred manifold, and minimizing certain natural expression for the energy written in terms of connections. In this we are, in a way, following the line of thought in Gauge Theories in Physics.