Iterative Facial Image Inpainting using Cyclic Reverse Generator

Facial image inpainting is a challenging problem as it requires generating new pixels that include semantic information for masked key components in a face, e.g., eyes and nose. Recently, remarkable methods have been proposed in this field. Most of these approaches use encoder-decoder architectures and have different limitations such as allowing unique results for a given image and a particular mask. Alternatively, some approaches generate promising results using different masks with generator networks. However, these approaches are optimization-based and usually require quite a number of iterations. In this paper, we propose an efficient solution to the facial image painting problem using the Cyclic Reverse Generator (CRG) architecture, which provides an encoder-generator model. We use the encoder to embed a given image to the generator space and incrementally inpaint the masked regions until a plausible image is generated; a discriminator network is utilized to assess the generated images during the iterations. We empirically observed that only a few iterations are sufficient to generate realistic images with the proposed model. After the generation process, for the post processing, we utilize a Unet model that we trained specifically for this task to remedy the artifacts close to the mask boundaries. Our method allows applying sketch-based inpaintings, using variety of mask types, and producing multiple and diverse results. We qualitatively compared our method with the state-of-the-art models and observed that our method can compete with the other models in all mask types; it is particularly better in images where larger masks are utilized.