A user-friendly interactive image inpainting framework using Laplacian coordinates

Image inpainting is a challenging topic in computer vision that seeks to recover the natural aspect of an image where data has been partially damaged or occluded by undesired objects. A common drawback not addressed by most inpainting methodologies is that the user must manually provide the inpainting mask as input data to the method. Selecting the inpainting mask is tedious, time consuming and it often requires artistic skills to precisely determine the mask. In this work we design a new tool that allows users to easily select the desirable mask. The proposed framework combines the high-adherence on image contours of the Laplacian Coordinates segmentation approach with the efficiency of a recent inpainting technique that unifies anisotropic diffusion, inner product-based filling order mechanism and exemplar-based completion. The user can interact with the object that he/she intends to edit by stroking small parts of the object so as to proceed with the segmentation and inpainting task. Our comparisons show that the proposed framework has good performance in terms of applicability and effectiveness when compared against other existing techniques in the literature.