Dust Donut Remover

[David Raphael]

Has anyone experimented with creating a dust donut removal tool?

I'm imaging something like the clone stamp at first.  This would allow you to clone illumination levels instead of the pixels...

I haven't really started looking into the feasibility yet, but it sure seems like something I would use.

Any thoughts are welcome...

Cheers,
David Raphael
http://www.astrofactors.com

[Carlos Milovic]

I tried with GREYCStoration. It performs inpaiting, if you use a mask and very aggressive parameters. The problem is that the results is too flat, and there may be some artifacts from stars in the field's edges.
Another alternative that may work well is a gradient domain modification... the problem here is that we need a poisson solver first... Juan?

[David Raphael]

what about drawing a box around the donut - and then applying an evening algorithm to the illumination levels?  If anything exceeds a certain threshold - normalize it to the average illumination?  I guess the problem is that this only works on an even background.  It won't work if there is a star or something along those lines...

I guess I am trying to apply an overly simple solution to a complex problem ;-)