Image Inpainting With Local and Global Refinement

Image inpainting has made remarkable progress with recent advances in deep learning. Popular networks mainly follow an encoder-decoder architecture (sometimes with skip connections) and possess sufficiently large receptive field, i.e., larger than the image resolution. The receptive field refers to the set of input pixels that are path-connected to a neuron. For image inpainting task, however, the size of surrounding areas needed to repair different kinds of missing regions are different, and the very large receptive field is not always optimal, especially for the local structures and textures. In addition, a large receptive field tends to involve more undesired completion results, which will disturb the inpainting process. Based on these insights, we rethink the process of image inpainting from a different perspective of receptive field, and propose a novel three-stage inpainting framework with local and global refinement. Specifically, we first utilize an encoder-decoder network with skip connection to achieve coarse initial results. Then, we introduce a shallow deep model with small receptive field to conduct the local refinement, which can also weaken the influence of distant undesired completion results. Finally, we propose an attention-based encoder-decoder network with large receptive field to conduct the global refinement. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state of the arts on three popular publicly available datasets for image inpainting. Our local and global refinement network can be directly inserted into the end of any existing networks to further improve their inpainting performance. Code is available at https://github.com/weizequan/LGNet.git.