Image inpainting automatically restores damaged images and partially removed pictures. Since most inpainting mechanisms inpaint damaged portions in a single layer, this study proposes a multilayer inpainting mechanism by examining how Chinese paintings are drawn in layers. The proposed multilayer inpainting mechanism employs a layer fusion strategy to detect the optimal inpaint combination among layers to restore paintings. Because this multilayer multi-resolution strategy considers damages in each layer from a multi-resolution perspective, it is superior to several existing techniques for restoring Chinese and Western paintings. In this study, the proposed algorithm is tested on more than 1,500 still images, with evaluations showing the effectiveness of image inpainting. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm achieves high PSNR values as well as high user satisfactions, including inpainting in some extreme cases where more than ninety percent of a painting are destroyed.

Keywords: image inpainting, image restoration, image completion, multi-resolution inpainting, multilayer inpainting, image processing

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Received October 2, 2006; revised January 5 & April 4, 2007; accepted May 2, 2007.
Communicated by Ja-Ling Wu.