Comic Image Inpainting via Distance Transform

Inpainting techniques for natural images have progressed significantly. However, if these methods are applied to comic images, the results are not satisfactory because of very noticeable artifacts, especially around line drawings. Line drawings are challenging to inpaint because of their high-frequency components. In this paper, we propose a novel method for inpainting comic images in the distance transform domain. In this method, we first convert a line drawing into a distance image and then inpaint the distance image. By transforming line drawings into distance images, we can eventually reduce the high-frequency components, which leads to improve inpainting performance. We compared the results of our proposed method with those of the conventional methods. The results showed that the proposed method achieved 0.1% lower l1 loss, 0.5dB higher PSNR, and 0.5% higher SSIM than those of the conventional inpainting methods.