Image Inpainting Using Directional Tensor Product Complex Tight Framelets

In this paper we are particularly interested in the image inpainting problem using directional complex tight wavelet frames. Under the assumption that frame coefficients of images are sparse, several iterative thresholding algorithms for the image inpainting problem have been proposed in the literature. The outputs of such iterative algorithms are closely linked to solutions of several convex minimization models using the balanced approach which simultaneously combines the $l_1$-regularization for sparsity of frame coefficients and the $l_2$-regularization for smoothness of the solution. Due to the redundancy of a tight frame, elements of a tight frame could be highly correlated and therefore, their corresponding frame coefficients of an image are expected to close to each other. This is called the grouping effect in statistics. In this paper, we establish the grouping effect property for frame-based convex minimization models using the balanced approach. This result on grouping effect partially explains the effectiveness of models using the balanced approach for several image restoration problems. Inspired by recent development on directional tensor product complex tight framelets (TP-CTFs) and their impressive performance for the image denoising problem, in this paper we propose an iterative thresholding algorithm using a single tight frame derived from TP-CTFs for the image inpainting problem. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm can handle well both cartoons and textures simultaneously and performs comparably and often better than several well-known frame-based iterative thresholding algorithms for the image inpainting problem without noise. For the image inpainting problem with additive zero-mean i.i.d. Gaussian noise, our proposed algorithm using TP-CTFs performs superior than other known state-of-the-art frame-based image inpainting algorithms.