A non-iterative automated mechanism for image inpainting

Portions of an image may be damaged or missing. Inpainting is required to recover the missing portions. Inpainting is cleaning off dirt, filling discolored sports, and repairing torn, warped, or cracked in a damaged image. The existing Navier-Stokes Partial Differential Equations (PDE) method for inpainting is iterative by nature, with a time variable serving as iteration parameter. For reasons of stability a large number of iterations can be needed which results in a computational complexity that is often too large for interactive image manipulation. A non-iterative automated mechanism for image inpainting is proposed. Colors are treated as fluid that flow or diffuse from the surrounding areas into the empty region. Gains ranging from 9.44 dB to 19.49 dB were obtained with the non-iterative automated inpainting scheme. The automated inpainting scheme overcomes the computational complexity associated with the existing Navier-Stokes PDE inpainting method, and is more suitable for interactive image manipulations.