Face Inpainting with Pre-trained Image Transformers

Image inpainting is an underdetermined inverse problem that allows various contents to fill in the missing or damaged regions realistically. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are commonly used to create aesthetically pleasing content, yet CNNs have restricted perception fields for collecting global characteristics. Transformers enable long-range relationships to be modeled and different content generated with autoregressive modeling of pixel-sequence distributions using image-level attention mechanism. However, the current approaches to inpainting with transformers are limited to task-specific datasets and require larger-scale data. We introduce an approach to image inpainting by leveraging pre-trained vision transformers to remedy this issue. Experiments show that our approach can outperform CNN-based approaches and have a remarkable performance closer to the task-specific transformer methods.