# Towards Interactive Image Inpainting via Sketch Refinement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.00407 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00407/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [VoxelMorph: A Learning Framework for Deformable Medical Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05231/) (2018)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Holistically-Nested Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06375/) (2015)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07723/) (2018)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [U2-Net: Going Deeper with Nested U-Structure for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09007/) (2020)
- [MAT: Mask-Aware Transformer for Large Hole Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15270/) (2022)
- [Gradio: Hassle-Free Sharing and Testing of ML Models in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02569/) (2019)
- [Pluralistic Image Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04227/) (2019)
- [High-Fidelity Pluralistic Image Completion with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14031/) (2021)
- [SC-FEGAN: Face Editing Generative Adversarial Network with User's Sketch and Color](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06838/) (2019)
- [Generating Diverse Structure for Image Inpainting With Hierarchical VQ-VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10022/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Image Inpainting via a Mutual Encoder-Decoder with Feature Equalizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06929/) (2020)
- [Foreground-aware Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05945/) (2019)

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

- [StableV2V: Stablizing Shape Consistency in Video-to-Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11045/) (2024)
- [StableSketcher: Enhancing Diffusion Model for Pixel-based Sketch Generation via Visual Question Answering Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20093/) (2025)
- [From Competition to Coopetition: Coopetitive Training-Free Image Editing Based on Text Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15948/) (2026)
- [SketchSense: Learning to Interpret Imperfect Sketch Guidance for Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13186/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

One tough problem of image inpainting is to restore complex structures in the corrupted regions. It motivates interactive image inpainting which leverages additional hints, e.g., sketches, to assist the inpainting process. Sketch is simple and intuitive to end users, but meanwhile has free forms with much randomness. Such randomness may confuse the inpainting models, and incur severe artifacts in completed images. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage image inpainting method termed SketchRefiner. In the first stage, we propose using a cross-correlation loss function to robustly calibrate and refine the user-provided sketches in a coarse-to-fine fashion. In the second stage, we learn to extract informative features from the abstracted sketches in the feature space and modulate the inpainting process. We also propose an algorithm to simulate real sketches automatically and build a test protocol with different applications. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that SketchRefiner effectively utilizes sketch information and eliminates the artifacts due to the free-form sketches. Our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art ones both qualitatively and quantitatively, meanwhile revealing great potential in real-world applications. Our code and dataset are available.