Digital inpainting: A tutorial

Digital inpainting is an interesting research topic in multimedia computing and image processing since 2000. This tutorial will cover the most recent contributions in image inpainting / image completion, video inpainting, and 3-D surface completion. In the literature, the first intention of image inpainting was to remove damages portions of an aged photo, by completing the area with surrounding or global information. The techniques used include the analysis and usage of pixel properties in spatial and frequency domains. Furthermore, image inpainting techniques were used in object removal (or image completion) in photos. Several strategic algorithms were developed based on confidence values and priorities of using patches. The techniques used in still images were then extended to video inpainting, which need to consider temporal properties such as motion vectors. With a reasonable combination of object tracking and image completion, objects in video can be removed and possibly replaced. On the other hand, aged films contain two types of defects: spikes and lone vertical lines. These defects need to be precisely detected and removed to restore the original film. In addition, based on image completion techniques, incompleteness of scanning results of a 3-D scanner due to improper location or other reasons of a scanner can be completed.