Image Inpainting by Band Matching, Seamless Cloning and Area Sub-Division
Su-Bin Lee, Yongduek Seo · Journal of Korea Multimedia Society · 2008
We propose a novel image inpainting method composed of two parts: band matching and seamless cloning. In band matching, a band enclosing the boundary of a missing region is compared to those from the other parts of the image. The inner area of the minimum difference band is then copied to the missing region. Even though this band matching results in successful inpainting in many practical applications, brightness discontinuity (a seam) may appear between the filled missing region and its neighborhood. We apply seamless cloning to remove such discontinuity between the two regions. However, since this basic method using one patch may not deal with cases where there are abrupt changes of color or brightness along the boundary, we furthermore devise one more step: target sub-division. The target area is subdivided into small sub-areas, and the band matching and seamless cloning are applied to each of them. The multiple results from the sub-division are then ordered according to inpainting quality, which is measured based on the edge map or discontinuity map along the boundary band.