Deep convolutional networks (CNNs) have exhibited their potential in image inpainting for producing plausible results.However, in most existing methods, e.g., context encoder, the missing parts are predicted by propagating the surrounding convolutional features through a fully connected layer, which intends to produce semantically plausible but blurry result. In this paper, we introduce a special shift-connection layer to the U-Net architecture, namely Shift-Net, for filling in missing regions of any shape with sharp structures and fine-detailed textures. To this end, the encoder feature of the known region is shifted to serve as an estimation of the missing parts. A guidance loss is introduced on decoder feature to minimize the distance between the decoder feature after fully connected layer and the ground truth encoder feature of the missing parts. With such constraint, the decoder feature in missing region can be used to guide the shift of encoder feature in known region. An end-to-end learning algorithm is further developed to train the Shift-Net. Experiments on the Paris StreetView and Places datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our Shift-Net in producing sharper, fine-detailed, and visually plausible results.
In exemplar-based inpainting @cite_14 @cite_4 @cite_15 @cite_44 @cite_33 @cite_43 @cite_45 @cite_28 @cite_46 @cite_23 @cite_21 @cite_37 @cite_0 @cite_12 @cite_7 @cite_2 , the completion is conducted from the exterior to the interior of the missing part by searching and copying best matching patches from the known region. For fast patch search, Barnes al. suggest a PatchMatch algorithm @cite_14 to exploit the image coherency, and generalize it for finding k-nearest neighbors @cite_4 . Generally, exemplar-based inpainting is superior in synthesizing textures, but is not well suited for preserving edges and structures. For better recovery of image structure, several patch priority measures have been proposed to fill in structural patches first @cite_15 @cite_23 @cite_27 . Global image coherence has also been introduced to the Markov random field (MRF) framework for improving visual quality @cite_28 @cite_17 @cite_34 . However, these methods only work well on images with simple structures, and may fail in handling images with complex objects and scenes. Besides, in most exemplar-based inpainting methods @cite_28 @cite_39 @cite_17 , the missing part is recovered as the shift representation of the known region in pixel region level, which also motivates our shift operation on convolution feature representation.
@cite_44 @cite_43 @cite_2 @cite_15 @cite_4 @cite_21 @cite_39 @cite_23 @cite_46 @cite_17 @cite_37 @cite_7 @cite_28 @cite_27 @cite_34 @cite_12 @cite_14 @cite_33 @cite_0 @cite_45
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This paper introduces a novel examplar-based inpainting algorithm through investigating the sparsity of natural image patches. Two novel concepts of sparsity at the patch level are proposed for modeling the patch priority and patch representation, which are two crucial steps for patch propagation in the examplar-based inpainting approach. First, patch structure sparsity is designed to measure the confidence of a patch located at the image structure (e.g., the edge or corner) by the sparseness of its nonzero similarities to the neighboring patches. The patch with larger structure sparsity will be assigned higher priority for further inpainting. Second, it is assumed that the patch to be filled can be represented by the sparse linear combination of candidate patches under the local patch consistency constraint in a framework of sparse representation. Compared with the traditional examplar-based inpainting approach, structure sparsity enables better discrimination of structure and texture, and the patch sparse representation forces the newly inpainted regions to be sharp and consistent with the surrounding textures. Experiments on synthetic and natural images show the advantages of the proposed approach. Until now, neighbor-embedding-based (NE) algorithms for super-resolution (SR) have carried out two independent processes to synthesize high-resolution (HR) image patches. In the first process, neighbor search is performed using the Euclidean distance metric, and in the second process, the optimal weights are determined by solving a constrained least squares problem. However, the separate processes are not optimal. In this paper, we propose a sparse neighbor selection scheme for SR reconstruction. We first predetermine a larger number of neighbors as potential candidates and develop an extended Robust-SL0 algorithm to simultaneously find the neighbors and to solve the reconstruction weights. Recognizing that the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) for reconstruction should have similar local geometric structures based on clustering, we employ a local statistical feature, namely histograms of oriented gradients (HoG) of low-resolution (LR) image patches, to perform such clustering. By conveying local structural information of HoG in the synthesis stage, the k-NN of each LR input patch is adaptively chosen from their associated subset, which significantly improves the speed of synthesizing the HR image while preserving the quality of reconstruction. Experimental results suggest that the proposed method can achieve competitive SR quality compared with other state-of-the-art baselines. Recent deep learning based approaches have shown promising results for the challenging task of inpainting large missing regions in an image. These methods can generate visually plausible image structures and textures, but often create distorted structures or blurry textures inconsistent with surrounding areas. This is mainly due to ineffectiveness of convolutional neural networks in explicitly borrowing or copying information from distant spatial locations. On the other hand, traditional texture and patch synthesis approaches are particularly suitable when it needs to borrow textures from the surrounding regions. Motivated by these observations, we propose a new deep generative model-based approach which can not only synthesize novel image structures but also explicitly utilize surrounding image features as references during network training to make better predictions. The model is a feedforward, fully convolutional neural network which can process images with multiple holes at arbitrary locations and with variable sizes during the test time. Experiments on multiple datasets including faces (CelebA, CelebA-HQ), textures (DTD) and natural images (ImageNet, Places2) demonstrate that our proposed approach generates higher-quality inpainting results than existing ones. Code, demo and models are available at: https: github.com JiahuiYu generative_inpainting. Most of the previous sparse coding (SC) based super resolution (SR) methods partition the image into overlapped patches, and process each patch separately. These methods, however, ignore the consistency of pixels in overlapped patches, which is a strong constraint for image reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a convolutional sparse coding (CSC) based SR (CSC-SR) method to address the consistency issue. Our CSC-SR involves three groups of parameters to be learned: (i) a set of filters to decompose the low resolution (LR) image into LR sparse feature maps, (ii) a mapping function to predict the high resolution (HR) feature maps from the LR ones, and (iii) a set of filters to reconstruct the HR images from the predicted HR feature maps via simple convolution operations. By working directly on the whole image, the proposed CSC-SR algorithm does not need to divide the image into overlapped patches, and can exploit the image global correlation to produce more robust reconstruction of image local structures. Experimental results clearly validate the advantages of CSC over patch based SC in SR application. Compared with state-of-the-art SR methods, the proposed CSC-SR method achieves highly competitive PSNR results, while demonstrating better edge and texture preservation performance.