Inpainting

While living in the Mission district I frequently saw a lot of tourists, a lot of graffiti and a lot of litter.

One day this finally made me very concerned! What if all of the pictures the tourists take accidentally contained graffiti or litter?

This concern led me to explore inpainting - the process of reconstructing regions of an image.

The tool I made allows for a user to indicate the region of a photograph to be replaced and then uses exemplar-based texture synthesis to replace the region.

At a high level, exemplar-based texture synthesis looks at the input photo and finds a region (the source) that is the best candidate to replace a patch in the selected (target) region of the image.

While this is typically done in image editors such as Photoshop, finding a source region for inpainting can provide a more automated solution that is easier for those not familiar with image editing programs.

This project implements the academic paper:

Region Filling and Object Removal by Exemplar-Based Image Inpainting by Criminisi et al.