New Logo Removal Plugin

[AMSS0815]

Hi everybody,

finally I completed my logo removal plugin. This is the abstract from the help file:

Image Inpainting is the art of restoring destroied parts of an image by using information of valid parts of the image in a way, so that the human eye does not recognize the damaged areas (at least not at a first sight). In video processing image inpainting is often applied to videos in order to remove TV station logos. This plugin comes with the intention to provide a suit for the removal of logos, whether opaque or transparent. It provides algorithms for these tasks:

• Logo detection: An obstacle is analyzed closely after being masked roughly by the user. The exact color map of the logo is determined as well as its alpha mask.
• Deblending: Given the color image and alpha mask of an overlayed logo, the logo is removed where it is not opaque.
• Logo inpainting: Opaque parts of the logo are interpolated. A fast method is used which has been published recently by Folkmar Bornemann and Tom März (see here).

Finally, a function for calculating the distance function of a mask is provided, which can be used to expand or inflate masks as well as to provide smooth blending masks.

The logo detection and deblending are (more or less) what you (might) know from Karel Suhajda's DeLogo filter for VirtualDub (but extended to YUV color spaces). The inpainting method is the implementation of a pretty new algorithm which produces much less blurring than the DeLogo filter. As I coded everything in pure C (without CPU optimizations) you shouldn't expect real-time performance.

This mathematics and algorithms (concerning inpainting) behind this plugin are still under heavy development and the effects of the various parameters are not fully understood yet. If you have some experiences with this plugin and some ideas which settings produce good results in which situations, please post them here so the authors can learn from it. Please do not contact any of the authors (WB, FB, TM) directly. Also I should note that this algorithm has originally been developed for inpainting pictures, not movies, so you might observe strong discontinuities in time.

The plugin is attached to this thread as zip-file, including source code, a help file, and a demo script. Everything is licensed under the GNU GPL 2. See files AVSInpaint.htm and GNUGPLv2.txt for details. Have fun!

Regards,
AMSS

Edit: Added version 2008.02.23 as announced here. AMSS