# Towards An End-to-End Framework for Flow-Guided Video Inpainting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02663 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02663/

## Key facts

- Cited by 113 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [Video Enhancement with Task-Oriented Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09078/) (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)
- [CSWin Transformer: A General Vision Transformer Backbone with Cross-Shaped Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00652/) (2021)
- [EDVR: Video Restoration with Enhanced Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02716/) (2019)
- [Optical Flow Estimation using a Spatial Pyramid Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00850/) (2016)
- [Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06601/) (2018)
- [BasicVSR++: Improving Video Super-Resolution with Enhanced Propagation and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13371/) (2021)
- [VirTex: Learning Visual Representations from Textual Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06666/) (2020)
- [Super SloMo: High Quality Estimation of Multiple Intermediate Frames for Video Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00080/) (2017)
- [BasicVSR: The Search for Essential Components in Video Super-Resolution and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02181/) (2020)
- [Learning Blind Video Temporal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00449/) (2018)
- [YouTube-VOS: Sequence-to-Sequence Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00461/) (2018)
- [Attention Mechanisms in Computer Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07624/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 113)

- [Track Anything: Segment Anything Meets Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11968/) (2023)
- [ProPainter: Improving Propagation and Transformer for Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03897/) (2023)
- [AMT: All-Pairs Multi-Field Transforms for Efficient Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09790/) (2023)
- [Swap Attention in Spatiotemporal Diffusions for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10874/) (2023)
- [VideoPainter: Any-length Video Inpainting and Editing with Plug-and-Play Context Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05639/) (2025)
- [Removing Objects From Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11966/) (2022)
- [Dense Optical Tracking: Connecting the Dots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00786/) (2023)
- [InFusion: Inpainting 3D Gaussians via Learning Depth Completion from Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11613/) (2024)
- [Shape-aware Text-driven Layered Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13173/) (2023)
- [VidBot: Learning Generalizable 3D Actions from In-the-Wild 2D Human Videos for Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07135/) (2025)
- [I'M HOI: Inertia-aware Monocular Capture of 3D Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08869/) (2023)
- [Generative Omnimatte: Learning to Decompose Video into Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16683/) (2024)
- [StereoCrafter: Diffusion-based Generation of Long and High-fidelity Stereoscopic 3D from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07447/) (2024)
- [UMMAFormer: A Universal Multimodal-adaptive Transformer Framework for Temporal Forgery Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14395/) (2023)
- [Towards Language-Driven Video Inpainting via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10226/) (2024)
- [MVInpainter: Learning Multi-View Consistent Inpainting to Bridge 2D and 3D Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08000/) (2024)
- [V2A-Mark: Versatile Deep Visual-Audio Watermarking for Manipulation Localization and Copyright Protection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16824/) (2024)
- [AR2-D2:Training a Robot Without a Robot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13818/) (2023)
- [Mask Propagation for Efficient Video Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18954/) (2023)
- [Bidirectionally Deformable Motion Modulation For Video-based Human Pose Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07754/) (2023)
- [Ag2Manip: Learning Novel Manipulation Skills with Agent-Agnostic Visual and Action Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17521/) (2024)
- [ZITS++: Image Inpainting by Improving the Incremental Transformer on Structural Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05950/) (2022)
- [Video Diffusion Models are Strong Video Inpainter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11402/) (2024)
- [SVG: 3D Stereoscopic Video Generation via Denoising Frame Matrix](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00367/) (2024)
- [NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Bitstream-Corrupted Video Restoration: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06945/) (2026)
- [Bitstream-Corrupted Video Recovery: A Novel Benchmark Dataset and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13890/) (2023)
- [Mitty: Diffusion-based Human-to-Robot Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17253/) (2025)
- [Flow-Guided Diffusion for Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15368/) (2023)
- [Transformer-based Generative Adversarial Networks in Computer Vision: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08641/) (2023)
- [TACO: Taming Diffusion for in-the-wild Video Amodal Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12049/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Optical flow, which captures motion information across frames, is exploited in recent video inpainting methods through propagating pixels along its trajectories. However, the hand-crafted flow-based processes in these methods are applied separately to form the whole inpainting pipeline. Thus, these methods are less efficient and rely heavily on the intermediate results from earlier stages. In this paper, we propose an End-to-End framework for Flow-Guided Video Inpainting (E2FGVI) through elaborately designed three trainable modules, namely, flow completion, feature propagation, and content hallucination modules. The three modules correspond with the three stages of previous flow-based methods but can be jointly optimized, leading to a more efficient and effective inpainting process. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively and shows promising efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NKU/E2FGVI.
