Inpaint an image matlab [duplicate] - image

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Efficient inpaint with neighbouring pixels
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Closed 6 years ago.
I am trying to replace all pixels with certain value in an image with the average values of the neighbors. Can interp2 be useful here? I tried this -
I = imread('test_image.JPG');
[r c] = size(I);
class_of_image = class(I);
[xi,yi] = meshgrid(1:0.5:c,1:0.5:r);
I1 = cast(interp2(double(image),xi,yi,'linear'),class_of_image);
[x_z,y_z] = find(I1==0);
I1(x_z,y_z) = I1(x_z-1,y_z)+I1(x_z+1,y_z)+I1(x_z,y_z-1)+I1(x_z,y_z+1);
This fails spectacularly with an error message - Index exceeds matrix dimensions.
I realize that the error is in trying to access I1 indices beyond r and c. Is there a generic way to incorporate this in the code?
Please help!

Answer 1

If you are trying to replace pixels in an image that are at a certain value to be the average of its 4 neighbours, then you don't have to use interp2. It looks like you are doubling the size of the image and then sampling from that image when you're done.
If you want to do what you're asking, you need to use column-major indices to facilitate the vectorized access of pixels. Specifically, you need to use sub2ind to help determine the locations you need to access in your matrix.
However, you will need to account for pixels that go out of bounds. There are many ways to accommodate this, but what I will implement is known as zero-padding where the border pixels are simply set to 0. I would create a zero-padded image where the top and bottom rows as well as the left and right values are all some sentinel value (like -1), use find on this image to find the coordinates then do the inpainting. Make sure you set the border pixels back to 0 before doing this so that you don't use -1 as part of the inpainting. You would then crop the border pixels of this new image when you're done to obtain the final output image.
Therefore, if you want to perform your "inpainting" try this instead:
% Read in image
I = imread('test_image.JPG');
% Create padded image with border pixels set to -1
Ipad = -ones(size(I) + 2);
% Place image in the middle
Ipad(2:end-1,2:end-1) = I;
% Find zero pixels
[r,c] = find(I == 0);
% Now set border pixels to 0
Ipad(Ipad == -1) = 0;
% Find column major indices for those elements that are 0
% as well as their 4 neighbours
ind = sub2ind(size(I), r, c);
ind_up = sub2ind(size(I), r-1, c);
ind_down = sub2ind(size(I), r+1, c);
ind_left = sub2ind(size(I), r, c-1);
ind_right = sub2ind(size(I), r, c+1);
% Perform the inpainting by averaging
Ipad(ind) = (Ipad(ind_up) + Ipad(ind_down) + Ipad(ind_left) + Ipad(ind_right))/4;
% Store the output in I1 after removing border pixels
I1 = Ipad(2:end-1,2:end-1);
However, a possibly shorter way to do this even though you would operate on the entire image would be to perform 2D convolution using a 3 x 3 kernel whose elements are 1 in the cardinal directions and ensuring that you divide by 4 to find the average value per location. After, you would simply copy over those values in the output that are 0 in the original image. You can use conv2 to do that and make sure you specify the 'same' flag to ensure that the output size is the same as the input size. The behaviour of conv2 when you approach the border elements is to zero-pad, which is what I did already in the first implementation:
% Read in image
I = imread('test_image.JPG');
% Specify kernel
kernel = [0 1 0; 1 0 1; 0 1 0] / 4;
% Perform convolution - make sure you cast image to double
% as convolution in 2D only works for floating-point types
out = conv2(double(I), kernel, 'same');
% Copy over those values from the output that match the value
% to be inpainted for the input. Also cast back to original
% data type.
I1 = I;
I1(I == 0) = cast(out(I == 0), class(I));