Recently, learning-based image inpainting has gained much attention. It widely utilizes an auto-encoder structure and can obtain compact feature representation in the encoder to achieve high-quality image inpainting. Although this approach has achieved encouraging inpainting results, it inevitably reduces the high-resolution representation due to interval downsampling. In order to solve this problem and achieve an excellent image inpainting effect, this paper proposes a brand-new generative network, Interactive Separation Network, which retains the high-resolution information and extracts the semantic features from corrupted images. Furthermore, this paper also discusses network designs with different complexity in different application scenarios. Finally, to improve the effectiveness and robustness of our proposal to large corrupted regions in the inpainting image, we further propose a flexible and highly reusable reconstruction scheme to complete the inpainting in the prediction process gradually. Experiments show that our proposed generation network and reconstruction scheme can significantly improve the quality of repaired images. The proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art image inpainting approaches in image quality.

Image inpainting is an active area of research in image processing that focuses on reconstructing damaged or missing parts of an image. The advent of deep learning has greatly advanced the field of image restoration in recent years. While there are many existing methods that can produce high-quality restoration results, they often struggle when dealing with images that have large missing areas, resulting in blurry and artifact-filled outcomes. This is primarily because of the presence of invalid information in the inpainting region, which interferes with the inpainting process. To tackle this challenge, the paper proposes a novel approach called separable mask update convolution. This technique automatically learns and updates the mask, which represents the missing area, to better control the influence of invalid information within the mask area on the restoration results. Furthermore, this convolution method reduces the number of network parameters and the size of the model. The paper also introduces a regional normalization technique that collaborates with separable mask update convolution layers for improved feature extraction, thereby enhancing the quality of the restored image. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs well in restoring images with large missing areas and outperforms state-of-the-art image inpainting methods significantly in terms of image quality.

Current single-view image inpainting methods often suffer from low image information utilization and suboptimal repair outcomes. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel image inpainting framework that leverages a structure-guided multi-scale attention pyramid network. This network consists of a structural repair network and a multi-scale attention pyramid semantic repair network. The structural repair component utilizes a dual-branch U-Net network for robust structure prediction under strong constraints. The predicted structural view then serves as auxiliary information for the semantic repair network. This latter network exploits the pyramid structure to extract multi-scale features of the image, which are further refined through an attention feature fusion module. Additionally, a separable gated convolution strategy is employed during feature extraction to minimize the impact of invalid information from missing areas, thereby enhancing the restoration quality. Experiments conducted on standard datasets such as Paris Street View and CelebA demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods through quantitative and qualitative comparisons. Further ablation studies, by incrementally integrating proposed mechanisms into a baseline model, substantiate the effectiveness of our multi-view restoration strategy, separable gated convolution, and multi-scale attention feature fusion.