due to the lifting and abrasion of the surrounding paint and thereby imposed
light reflections, the immediate areas around the cracks are also
unreliable. The crack inpainting method from [7] specifically tailored to this application already generally improved the legibility of
the text and was shown to outperform some “general-purpose”
patch-based inpainting methods like [9] and [17]. However, some problems are still present, e.g., parts of the letters through which
wide cracks are passing are occasionally deleted after virtual
inpainting. To alleviate this problem, a better approach to handling
continuation of image structures is needed. We discuss a possible
solution with encouraging initial results next.