Higher order equations, when applied to image inpainting, have certain advantages over second order equations, such as continuation of both edge and intensity information over larger distances. Discretizing a fourth order evolution equation with a brute force method may restrict the time steps to a size up to orderx 4 wherex denotes the step size of the spatial grid. In this work we present efficient semi-implicit schemes that are guaranteed to be unconditionally stable. We explain the main idea of these schemes and present applications in image processing for inpainting with the Cahn-Hilliard equation, TV-H −1 inpainting, and inpainting with LCIS (low curvature image simplifiers).