Level lines based disocclusion

Object recognition, robotic vision, occluding noise removal or photograph design require the ability to perform disocclusion. We call disocclusion the recovery of hidden parts of objects in a digital image by interpolation from the vicinity of the occluded area. It is shown in this paper how disocclusion can be performed by means of a level lines structure, which offers a reliable, complete and contrast-invariant representation of an image, in contrast to edges. Level lines based disocclusion yields a solution that may have strong discontinuities, which is not possible with PDE-based interpolation. Moreover, the proposed method is fully compatible with Kanizsa's (1996) theory of "amodal completion".