Semantic Image Inpainting with Progressive Generative Networks

Recently, image inpainting task has revived with the help of deep learning techniques. Deep neural networks, especially the generative adversarial networks~(GANs) make it possible to recover the missing details in images. Due to the lack of sufficient context information, most existing methods fail to get satisfactory inpainting results. This work investigates a more challenging problem, e.g., the newly-emerging semantic image inpainting - a task to fill in large holes in natural images. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework named progressive generative networks~(PGN), which regards the semantic image inpainting task as a curriculum learning problem. Specifically, we divide the hole filling process into several different phases and each phase aims to finish a course of the entire curriculum. After that, an LSTM framework is used to string all the phases together. By introducing this learning strategy, our approach is able to progressively shrink the large corrupted regions in natural images and yields promising inpainting results. Moreover, the proposed approach is quite fast to evaluate as the entire hole filling is performed in a single forward pass. Extensive experiments on Paris Street View and ImageNet dataset clearly demonstrate the superiority of our approach. Code for our models is available at https://github.com/crashmoon/Progressive-Generative-Networks.