Region-aware Attention for Image Inpainting

Recent attention-based image inpainting methods have made inspiring progress by modeling long-range dependencies within a single image. However, they tend to generate blurry contents since the correlation between each pixel pairs is always misled by ill-predicted features in holes. To handle this problem, we propose a novel region-aware attention (RA) module. By avoiding the directly calculating corralation between each pixel pair in a single samples and considering the correlation between different samples, the misleading of invalid information in holes can be avoided. Meanwhile, a learnable region dictionary (LRD) is introduced to store important information in the entire dataset, which not only simplifies correlation modeling, but also avoids information redundancy. By applying RA in our architecture, our methodscan generate semantically plausible results with realistic details. Extensive experiments on CelebA, Places2 and Paris StreetView datasets validate the superiority of our method compared with existing methods.

Structure-aware Image Inpainting with Two Parallel Streams

Recent works in image inpainting have shown that structural information plays an important role in recovering visually pleasing results. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end architecture composed of two parallel UNet-based streams: a main stream (MS) and a structure stream (SS). With the assistance of SS, MS can produce plausible results with reasonable structures and realistic details. Specifically, MS reconstructs detailed images by inferring missing structures and textures simultaneously, and SS restores only missing structures by processing the hierarchical information from the encoder of MS. By interacting with SS in the training process, MS can be implicitly encouraged to exploit structural cues. In order to help SS focus on structures and prevent textures in MS from being affected, a gated unit is proposed to depress structure-irrelevant activations in the information flow between MS and SS. Furthermore, the multi-scale structure feature maps in SS are utilized to explicitly guide the structure-reasonable image reconstruction in the decoder of MS through the fusion block. Extensive experiments on CelebA, Paris StreetView and Places2 datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.