Semantic Image Inpainting with Multi-Stage Feature Reasoning Generative Adversarial Network

Most existing image inpainting methods have achieved remarkable progress in small image defects. However, repairing large missing regions with insufficient context information is still an intractable problem. In this paper, a Multi-stage Feature Reasoning Generative Adversarial Network to gradually restore irregular holes is proposed. Specifically, dynamic partial convolution is used to adaptively adjust the restoration proportion during inpainting progress, which strengthens the correlation between valid and invalid pixels. In the decoding phase, the statistical natures of features in the masked areas differentiate from those of unmasked areas. To this end, a novel decoder is designed which not only dynamically assigns a scaling factor and bias on per feature point basis using point-wise normalization, but also utilizes skip connections to solve the problem of information loss between the codec network layers. Moreover, in order to eliminate gradient vanishing and increase the reasoning times, a hybrid weighted merging method consisting of a hard weight map and a soft weight map is proposed to ensemble the feature maps generated during the whole reconstruction process. Experiments on CelebA, Places2, and Paris StreetView show that the proposed model generates results with a PSNR improvement of 0.3 dB to 1.2 dB compared to other methods.