StackOverflow in my flood fill

Question

I am currently creating a little paint program for exercise. Right now i'm trying to do the paint bucket tool, or in other words a flood fill. The funny thing is: if the number of pixels which have to be filled is small, everything works fine. If hate number of to filling pixels is higher, it gives me a SO-Exception. Here is my code:

private void FloodFill(Bitmap picture, int x, int y)
{
  if (x <= 0 || y <= 0 || x >= DrawingPanel.Width || y >= DrawingPanel.Height)
  {
    return;
  }

  if (picture.GetPixel(x, y) != löschFarbe)
  {
    return;
  }

  if (picture.GetPixel(x, y) == löschFarbe)
  {
    picture.SetPixel(x, y, ColorButton.BackColor);
  }

  FloodFill(picture, x + 1, y);
  FloodFill(picture, x, y + 1);
  FloodFill(picture, x - 1, y);
  FloodFill(picture, x, y - 1);
  FloodFill(picture, x + 1, y + 1);
  FloodFill(picture, x - 1, y + 1);
  FloodFill(picture, x + 1, y - 1);
  FloodFill(picture, x - 1, y - 1);
}

"löschFarbe" is the color which is clicked (which will be erased/overwritten with another color)

Error occurring: If i want to fill the complete picture or a big space, I get an error here:

if (picture.GetPixel(x, y) != löschFarbe)
  {
    return;
  }

Anyone knows how I can solve this?

BTW this is a picture of my program:

Answer 1

Even a moderate sized floodfill will blow your call stack.

Try converting this recursion based method to a stack based method as in this question.