# Image Inpainting with Edge-guided Learnable Bidirectional Attention Maps

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.12087 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12087/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07723/) (2018)
- [EnhanceNet: Single Image Super-Resolution Through Automated Texture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07919/) (2016)
- [EdgeConnect: Generative Image Inpainting with Adversarial Edge Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00212/) (2019)
- [Pluralistic Image Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04227/) (2019)
- [StructureFlow: Image Inpainting via Structure-aware Appearance Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03852/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Image Inpainting via a Mutual Encoder-Decoder with Feature Equalizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06929/) (2020)
- [Coherent Semantic Attention for Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12384/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Inpainting using Multi-Scale Neural Patch Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09969/) (2016)
- [Foreground-aware Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05945/) (2019)
- [Shift-Net: Image Inpainting via Deep Feature Rearrangement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09392/) (2018)
- [Image Inpainting via Generative Multi-column Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08771/) (2018)
- [Image Inpainting with Learnable Bidirectional Attention Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00968/) (2019)
- [Contextual-based Image Inpainting: Infer, Match, and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08590/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Deep Face Video Inpainting via UV Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00681/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

For image inpainting, the convolutional neural networks (CNN) in previous methods often adopt standard convolutional operator, which treats valid pixels and holes indistinguishably. As a result, they are limited in handling irregular holes and tend to produce color-discrepant and blurry inpainting result. Partial convolution (PConv) copes with this issue by conducting masked convolution and feature re-normalization conditioned only on valid pixels, but the mask-updating is handcrafted and independent with image structural information. In this paper, we present an edge-guided learnable bidirectional attention map (Edge-LBAM) for improving image inpainting of irregular holes with several distinct merits. Instead of using a hard 0-1 mask, a learnable attention map module is introduced for learning feature re-normalization and mask-updating in an end-to-end manner. Learnable reverse attention maps are further proposed in the decoder for emphasizing on filling in unknown pixels instead of reconstructing all pixels. Motivated by that the filling-in order is crucial to inpainting results and largely depends on image structures in exemplar-based methods, we further suggest a multi-scale edge completion network to predict coherent edges. Our Edge-LBAM method contains dual procedures,including structure-aware mask-updating guided by predict edges and attention maps generated by masks for feature re-normalization.Extensive experiments show that our Edge-LBAM is effective in generating coherent image structures and preventing color discrepancy and blurriness, and performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of qualitative metrics and visual quality.