Vol.9,No.1:25—36
An Image Inpainting Technique Based on
the Fast Marching Method
Alexandru Telea
Eindhoven University of Technology
Abstract. Digital inpainting provides a means for reconstruction of small dam-
aged portions of an image. Although the inpainting basics are straightforward, most
inpainting techniques published in the literature are complex to understand and im-
plement. We present here a new algorithm for digital inpainting based on the fast
marching method for level set applications. Our algorithm is v ery simple to im-
plement, fast, and produces nearly identical results to more complex, and usually
slower, known methods. Source code is available online.
1. Introduction
Digital inpainting, the technique of reconstructing small damaged portions of
an image, has received considerable attention in recent years. Digital inpaint-
ing serves a wide range of applications, such as removing text and logos from
still images or videos, reconstructing scans of deteriorated images by remov-
ing scratches or stains, or creating artistic effects. Most inpainting methods
work as follows. First, the image regions to be inpainted are selected, usu-
ally manually. Next, color information is propagated inward from the region
boundaries, i.e., the known image information is used to fill in the missing
areas. In order to produce a perceptually plausible reconstruction, an in-
painting technique should attempt to continue the isophotes (lines of equal
gray value) as smoothly as possible inside the r econstructed region. In other
words, the missing region should be inpainted so that the inpainted gray value
and gradient extrapolate the gray value and gradient outside this region.
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