Forward image mapping using image inpainting

Image transform, which transforms one image to another image by co-ordinate transformation, is often conducted in remote sensing applications. Image transform methods include forward mapping and reverse mapping. In this paper we propose a new forward image mapping method. Since a grid pixel in the source image may be no longer mapped to a grid pixel in the target image, gap phenomenon, i.e. some grids in the target may not receive information from any source pixel, occurs via forward mapping. Our method fills the gaps with information surrounding them using the image inpainting technique. Imagine that the image is a temperature field, i.e. the pixel value is the temperature value. The heat will transfer to the gaps, thus the gaps are filled after some time. This can be achieved by solving the classical diffusion equation. Furthermore, if the features in the image are rather complicated, we can use anisotropic heat diffusion (total variation diffusion) to fill the gaps in order to well preserve the edge features. The experimental result demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed inpainting method.