Abstract: The total variation algorithm applied to restore image is fulfilled without taking into account denoising. Then the main research effort focuses on the image inpainting for long but narrow rectangle blank area, and an improved image inpainting method based on the total variation algorithm is presented. It introduces different weights into the algorithm according to the features of blank area to be inpainted, and it only restores the lost information for the blank area according to the surrounding information but keeping the surrounding information unchanged. Besides, the proposed algorithm makes full use of the surrounding information during the inpainting process in order to ensure the likeness of inpainting areas. Plenty of experiments show that the proposed method is effective for the image inpainting, especially for the long and narrow blank area as well as for the linear information lost area.