Progressive Semantic Reasoning for Image Inpainting

Image inpainting aims to reconstruct the missing or unknown region for a given image. As one of the most important topics from image processing, this task has attracted increasing research interest over the past few decades. Learning-based methods have been employed to solve this task, and achieved superior performance. Nevertheless, existing methods often produce artificial traces, due to the lack of constraints on image characterization under different semantics. To accommodate this issue, we propose a novel artistic Progressive Semantic Reasoning (PSR) network in this paper, which is composed of three shared parameters from the generation network superposition. More precisely, the proposed PSR algorithm follows a typical end-to-end training procedure, that learns low-level semantic features and further transfers them to a high-level semantic network for inpainting purposes. Furthermore, a simple but effective Cross Feature Reconstruction (CFR) strategy is proposed to tradeoff semantic information from different levels. Empirically, the proposed approach is evaluated via intensive experiments using a variety of real-world datasets. The results confirm the effectiveness of our algorithm compared with other state-of-the-art methods. The source code can be found from https://github.com/sfwyly/PSR-Net.