Partial Convolution U-Net for Inpainting Distorted Images

Abstract

Image inpainting is a domain in which researchers have shown considerable interest, and when it comes to deep learning techniques, realistic problems become interesting and challenging. In image inpainting, a corrupted facial image with missing holes or significant holes can be restored and compared to the original image to see if it is real or fake. In addition to fixing the texture of the image and getting the image's high-level abstract properties, it may also recover semantic images such as human faces. In the field of image-inpainting models, the Attention model with features learned through semantic approaches and progressive networks has become particularly popular. The proposed model introduces (i) Attention blocks in each decoder layer of U-Net architecture and (ii) a hybrid loss function leveraging both Mean Square Error (MSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE). The proposed Attention-based U-Net showed remarkable performance with SSIM and PSNR by 0.1067 and 13.63, respectively, compared to the previous approaches. © 2024 IEEE.