Patent ID: 8437567

Claim:
An image inpainting apparatus using a restricted search region, the apparatus comprising: a target region setup unit for setting a target image region to be inpainted in response to an image inpainting request; a surrounding region setup unit for setting a surrounding image region which has a preset size and comprises the set target image region; a similar region division unit for setting a plurality of similar image regions by grouping similar pixels in the set surrounding image region, and dividing the surrounding image region into the plurality of set similar image regions; a search region setup unit for dividing the target image region according to the similar image regions, and setting a search region of each divided target image region; and an inpainting processing unit for detecting an image of an image region most similar to each divided target image region from the set search region of each divided target image region, and copying and pasting the detected image into each corresponding target image region.