Deep Stacked Networks with Residual Polishing for Image Inpainting
This work addresses artifact reduction in image inpainting for computer vision applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing inpainting methods by adding a polishing stage.
The paper tackles the problem of artifacts and noise in deep neural network-based image inpainting by proposing a two-stage framework with stacked networks for coarse inpainting and artifact removal, achieving significant improvements in visual and quantitative evaluations.
Deep neural networks have shown promising results in image inpainting even if the missing area is relatively large. However, most of the existing inpainting networks introduce undesired artifacts and noise to the repaired regions. To solve this problem, we present a novel framework which consists of two stacked convolutional neural networks that inpaint the image and remove the artifacts, respectively. The first network considers the global structure of the damaged image and coarsely fills the blank area. Then the second network modifies the repaired image to cancel the noise introduced by the first network. The proposed framework splits the problem into two distinct partitions that can be optimized separately, therefore it can be applied to any inpainting algorithm by changing the first network. Second stage in our framework which aims at polishing the inpainted images can be treated as a denoising problem where a wide range of algorithms can be employed. Our results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves significant improvement on both visual and quantitative evaluations.