An inpainting system for automatic image structure - texture restoration with text removal

In this paper we deal with the inpainting problem and with the problem of finding text in images. We first review many of the methods used for structure and texture inpaintings. The novel contribution of the paper is the combination of the inpainting techniques with the techniques of finding text in images and a simple morphological algorithm that links them. This combination results in an automatic system for text removal and image restoration that requires no user interface at all. Examples on real images show very good performance of the proposed system and the importance of the new linking algorithm. Index Terms — inpainting, texture synthesis, text detection, mathematical morphology. 1