Automatic image inpainting for the facial images of monuments

Abstract

Image inpainting is the process of restoring or modifying the image contents im- perceptibly. In this paper we propose a novel approach for automatic image inpainting of the ruined frontal face images of monuments or statues of historic places. Given a facial test image and a set of frontal face images consisting of vandalized and non-vandalized regions captured from the same historical site, our objective is to: 1. detect both the vandalized and non-vandalized regions, 2. inpaint the vandalized regions using the non-vandalized one. Potential regions of interest (ROI) are localized using edge based features. Final detection is done using appropriate designed templates for vandalized and non-vandalized regions. Once the regions are detected the inpainting of the vandalized region is done by using similar regions that are non-vandalized. The non-vandalized regions are selected either from the same image or from other images available in the database. Poisson image editing is used for inpainting the vandalized regions. Novelty of our approach lies in automatic detection of vandalized regions and inpainting them using the non-vandalized regions already existing in the database.