Quickly remove unnecessary objects from pictures. Magic Inpainter Express is a image inpainting tool. Inpainting is removal of text, stains and unnecessary information from images. The tool can be usefull for removal of text, date stamps, stains and other small or medium sized regions. It has easy and user friendly design which is described in the sections below.

The tool uses unique context based image restoration algorithm. The purpose of the inpainting algorithm is to restore noisy regions of the image in a natural way. The algorithm works better for textures but it had also been tested successfully on various kind of photos. It can remove any kind of small and large monocolor regions from images. As long as they do not obscure unique and non-repeating important information they are restored, in most cases, without visual damage of the image. The algorithm preserves the background texture pattern, it tries to preserve also the contours and edges.

As was pointed above the restoring algorithm is context based. It first describes the region of each non-noice pixel with a multi-dimensional key. This key should contain enough information about the pixel neighbourhood. Pixels too close to image boundary or
with too many noisy neighbours are excluded. All keys are sorted in special indexed array and then similar procedure is repeated for the noice pixels.

For each noice pixel a similar multi-dimensional key is obtained. The keys describing the noisy pixels are then also sorted depending of their non-noisy neighbor's number. The pixels on the noise region boundary are put in the beginning of the list. When inpaint procedure starts, these pixels are first restored. Then algorithm updates all keys with the new pixel values and resorts the noisy keys list. This repeats until all pixels are restored or if procedure is canceled from the user. The missing pixels values are calculated from the pixels with most similar keys. To find these pixels the algorithm performs multi-dimensional search in the image keys list. In this way Magic Inpainter fills the missing pixels as first transforms the 2D image pixels to a multi-dimensional pixels in the feature-space, and then, when find the closest to it neighbours, replace its value with their color values.

The advantage of this approach is that it is very general. It can be used on any kind of images and even for large stains. It preserves the background texture pattern and in most cases the contours and edges. The algorithm can also be modified for other purposes
- textures extraction and generation, CBIR - Content Based Image Retrieval, effective search in image databases, image and pattern recognition and etc.

The main limitations are :
- the multi-dimensional nearest neighbour search is quite slow
- results are not always great if inpaint settings are not optimal

Magic Inpainter also performs several standard image processing tecniques which makes the outlining of the noice region quite easy, even if it contain several colors. How to do this is described in details in the next section.

Limitations:
* Is slower then the standard smotthing techniques. Also removal of too large objects when too much information is missing is not possible

The license of this software is Free Trial Software, you can free download and get a free trial.