The digital image inpainting technology based on partial differential equations (PDEs) has become an intensive research topic over the last few years due to the mature theory and prolific numerical algorithms of PDEs. However, PDE based models are not effective when used to inpaint large missing areas of images, such as that produced by object removal. To overcome this problem, in this paper, a two-phase image inpainting method is proposed. First, some edges which cross the damaged regions are located and the missing parts of these edges are fitted by using the cubic spline interpolation. These fitted edges partition the damaged regions into some smaller damaged regions. Then these smaller regions may be inpainted by using classical PDE models. Experiment results show that the inpainting results by using the proposed method are better than those of BSCB model and TV model.
