Chan, Tony F.Kang, Sung HaShen, Jianhong2007-08-162007-08-162001-04https://hdl.handle.net/11299/3559Image inpainting is a special image restoration problem for which image prior models play a crucial role. Euler's elastica was first introduced by Mumford [21] to computer vision as a prior curve model. By functionalizaing the elastica energy, Masnou and Morel [19] proposed an elastica based variational inpainting model. The current paper is intended to contribute to the development of its mathematical foundation, and the study of its properties and connections to the earlier works of Bertalmio, Sapiro, Caselles, and Ballester [2] and Chan and Shen [6,7]. A computational scheme based on numerical PDEs is presented, which allows the handling of topologically complex inpainting domains.