Inpainting: a restorers’ word for a machine
In July 2000 at SIGGRAPH Marcelo Bertalmío and Guillermo Sapiro (Minnesota) with Vicent Caselles and Coloma Ballester (Pompeu Fabra) described digital inpainting: a person roughly marks the damaged area, and the program continues inward the lines of equal brightness that reach its edge.
Why it matters
The word was taken from restorers of paintings, and since this paper it names the task that is still being solved by the diffusion models of the 2020s: to fill a marked area so that the intervention cannot be seen. What was new was that the person no longer said where the content should come from.
SIGGRAPH 2000 proceedings, pages 417-424; ACM gives 59 papers accepted of 304 submitted. The method is anisotropic diffusion carrying isophotes into the region; the paper’s applications are scratches on old photographs and film, superimposed text (dates, subtitles), microphones and wires in a shot. Marking the regions took a few seconds in the examples, and each colour example ran in under 5 minutes on a 300 MHz Pentium II. Poisson image editing in 2003 would note that such equations work only across narrow gaps without texture.