Learning OpenCV, 2nd Edition

Inpainting

Inpainting works provided the damaged area is not too “thick” and enough of the original texture and color

remains around the boundaries of the damage.

Figure 6-27 shows what happens when the damaged area is too large.

Figure 6-26: Inpainting: an image damaged by overwritten text (left) is restored by inpainting (right)

The prototype for cv::inpaint() is

void cv::inpaint(

cv::InputArray src, // Input Image: 8-bit, 1 or 3 channels

cv::InputArray inpaintMask, // 8-bit, 1 channel. Inpaint non-zeros

cv::OutputArray dst, // Result image

double inpaintRadius, // Range to consider around pixel

int flags // Select NS or TELEA

);

Figure 6-27: Inpainting cannot magically restore textures that are completely removed: the navel of the

orange has been completely blotted out (left); inpainting fills it back in with mostly orangelike texture

(right)

Here src is an 8-bit single-channel grayscale image or a three-channel color image to be repaired, and

inpaintMask is an 8-bit single-channel image of the same size as src in which the damaged areas (e.g.,

the writing seen in the left panel of

Figure 6-26) have been marked by nonzero pixels; all other pixels are set to 0 in inpaintMask. The

output image will be written ...