Abstract: The physical characteristics of total variation （TV） model and p-Laplace operator in local coordinates are analyzed,which shows that the diffusion performance of p-Laplace operator is essentially superior to that of TV model.Then,an image inpainting algorithm based on p-Laplace operator is proposed.This algorithm makes full use of the nonlinear anisotropic diffusion of p-Laplace operator to inpaint damaged images.Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has better general performance in convergence speed and inpainting quality.