Efficient Inpainting of Old Film Scratch using Sobel Edge Operator based Isophote Computation

Old films or photographs usually have damages from physical or chemical effects, and the damage and digitalization make stain, scratch, scribbling, noise, and digital drop out in frames. Inpainting is a wellknown technique to restore damages in images. Bertalmio¿s inpainting scheme shows good reconstruction, but it requires much time complexity. We present a modified inpainting scheme, where we use Sobel edge operator¿s magnitude and angle to compute isophotes. We experiment our scheme with standard test images and Korean old films. Simulation results show that our scheme requires smaller time complexity than Bertalmio¿s scheme with comparable reconstructed image quality.