An improved GAN-based approach for image inpainting

Ngoc-Thao Nguyen, Bang-Dang Pham, Thanh-Sang Thai, Minh-Thanh Nguyen

Abstract: Image inpainting aims to complete missing regions in images, effectively serves imagery processes like historical image restoration or photo editing. This task is challenging because the completion should maintain visual coherence throughout the image. This paper’s contribution lies in an architecture that comprises multiple generators and discriminators to achieve better inpainting results. The two generators work sequentially, in which the first model coarsely reconstructs the missing regions, and the latter completes these regions following the given prior knowledge. Meanwhile, the discriminator stage includes two parallel, global and local branches, allowing for more significant discrimination. We further suggest using dilated convolution, which effectively broadens the receptive field, and WGAN-GP to mitigate gradient vanishing. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments on standard datasets have shown that our method provides more plausible results than current baselines.