# Automatic High Resolution Wire Segmentation and Removal

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00221 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00221/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07723/) (2018)
- [OneFormer: One Transformer to Rule Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06220/) (2022)
- [Neighborhood Attention Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07143/) (2022)
- [Large Scale Image Completion via Co-Modulated Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10428/) (2021)
- [Keep your Eyes on the Lane: Real-time Attention-guided Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12035/) (2020)
- [Contextual Residual Aggregation for Ultra High-Resolution Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09704/) (2020)
- [CascadePSP: Toward Class-Agnostic and Very High-Resolution Segmentation via Global and Local Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02551/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Inpainting with Iterative Confidence Feedback and Guided Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11742/) (2020)
- [Dilated Neighborhood Attention Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15001/) (2022)
- [Collaborative Global-Local Networks for Memory-Efficient Segmentation of Ultra-High Resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06368/) (2019)
- [CM-GAN: Image Inpainting with Cascaded Modulation GAN and Object-Aware Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11947/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Raformer: Redundancy-Aware Transformer for Video Wire Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15802/) (2024)
- [Power Battery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07797/) (2025)
- [Vision-Based Power Line Cables and Pylons Detection for Low Flying Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14352/) (2024)
- [UCorr: Wire Detection and Depth Estimation for Autonomous Drones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14989/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Wires and powerlines are common visual distractions that often undermine the aesthetics of photographs. The manual process of precisely segmenting and removing them is extremely tedious and may take up hours, especially on high-resolution photos where wires may span the entire space. In this paper, we present an automatic wire clean-up system that eases the process of wire segmentation and removal/inpainting to within a few seconds. We observe several unique challenges: wires are thin, lengthy, and sparse. These are rare properties of subjects that common segmentation tasks cannot handle, especially in high-resolution images. We thus propose a two-stage method that leverages both global and local contexts to accurately segment wires in high-resolution images efficiently, and a tile-based inpainting strategy to remove the wires given our predicted segmentation masks. We also introduce the first wire segmentation benchmark dataset, WireSegHR. Finally, we demonstrate quantitatively and qualitatively that our wire clean-up system enables fully automated wire removal with great generalization to various wire appearances.