Deep Generative Model for Image Inpainting with Local Binary Pattern Learning and Spatial Attention

Deep learning (DL) has demonstrated its powerful capabilities in the field of image inpainting. The DL-based image inpainting approaches can produce visually plausible results, but often generate various unpleasant artifacts, especially in the boundary and highly textured regions. To tackle this challenge, in this work, we propose a new end-to-end, two-stage (coarse-to-fine) generative model through combining a local binary pattern (LBP) learning network with an actual inpainting network. Specifically, the first LBP learning network using U-Net architecture is designed to accurately predict the structural information of the missing region, which subsequently guides the second image inpainting network for better filling the missing pixels. Furthermore, an improved spatial attention mechanism is integrated in the image inpainting network, by considering the consistency not only between the known region with the generated one, but also within the generated region itself. Extensive experiments on public datasets including CelebA-HQ, Places and Paris StreetView demonstrate that our model generates better inpainting results than the state-of-the-art competing algorithms, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The source code and trained models will be made available at https://github.com/HighwayWu/ImageInpainting.