Image Inpainting via Residual Attention Fusion and Gated Information Distillation

Image inpainting is of great significance and value in computer vision tasks. In recent years, image inpainting models based on deep learning have been widely used in this field. However, the existing deep learning image inpainting models have the problems of insufficient utilization of the effective information in the damaged image and interference by the mask information in the damaged image, which leads to the loss of part of the structure and fuzzy part of the details of the repaired image. Therefore, this paper proposed an image inpainting model based on a residual attention fusion and gated information distillation. Firstly, the model consists of two parts, the generator and the discriminator. The backbone structure of the generator uses the U-Net network and consists of two parts, the encoder and the decoder. The discriminator uses a Markov discriminator and consists of six convolutional layers. Then, the residual attention fusion block was used in the encoder and decoder, respectively, to enhance the utilization of valid information in the broken image and reduce the interference of mask information. Finally, a gated information distillation block was embedded in the skip connection of the encoder and decoder to further extract the low-level features in the damaged image. The experimental results on public face and street view datasets show that, the proposed model has better repair performance in semantic structure and texture details; the proposed model outperforms the five contrast models in structural similarity, peak signal to noise ratio, mean absolute error, mean square error and Fréchet distance indicators, demonstrating that the inpainting quality of the proposed model is superior to the compared models.