Level lines based disocclusion
Simon Masnou, Jean‐Michel Morel · 2002
Object recognition, robotic vision, occluding noise removal or photograph design require the ability to perform disocclusion. We call disocclusion the recovery of hidden parts of objects in a digital image by interpolation from the vicinity of the occluded area. It is shown in this paper how disocclusion can be performed by means of a level lines structure, which offers a reliable, complete and contrast-invariant representation of an image, in contrast to edges. Level lines based disocclusion yields a solution that may have strong discontinuities, which is not possible with PDE-based interpolation. Moreover, the proposed method is fully compatible with Kanizsa's (1996) theory of "amodal completion".