Bridging Global Context Interactions for High-Fidelity Image Completion

Bridging global context interactions correctly is important for high-fidelity image completion with large masks. Previous methods attempting this via deep or large receptive field (RF) convolutions cannot escape from the dominance of nearby interactions, which may be inferior. In this paper, we propose to treat image completion as a directionless sequence-to-sequence prediction task, and deploy a transformer to directly capture long-range dependence in the encoder. Crucially, we employ a restrictive CNN with small and non-overlapping RF for weighted token representation, which allows the transformer to explicitly model the long-range visible context relations with equal importance in all layers, without implicitly confounding neighboring tokens when larger RFs are used. To improve appearance consistency between visible and generated regions, a novel attention-aware layer (AAL) is introduced to better exploit distantly related high-frequency features. Overall, extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on several datasets.