Restoring damaged images using inpainting

The restoration of an image is the computational process of reconstructing damaged parts from existing parts of an image. If we capture an image on film with a photographic camera and develop it on paper, the photographic paper tends to degrade with the passage of time, leading to degradation of the photograph. Faulty sensors and imperfections such as dust and dirt on the camera lenses can introduce errors in the captured image. The process of transmission and reception can also introduce errors in the digital image. Image inpainting techniques can restore degraded and damaged images. Many algorithms are available to repair images. The OpenCV library implements two of the repairing methods using the cv2.inpaint() function.

This function accepts a degraded or damaged source image, a mask for image inpainting, the size of the inpainting neighborhood, and the inpainting method as arguments. The mask of inpainting is the damaged area represented...