Parallel Image Completion with Edge and Color Map

Abstract

Over the last few years, image completion has made significant progress due to the generative adversarial networks (GANs) that are able to synthesize photorealistic contents. However, one of the main obstacles faced by many existing methods is that they often create blurry textures or distorted structures that are inconsistent with surrounding regions. The main reason is the ineffectiveness of disentangling style latent space implicitly from images. To address this problem, we develop a novel image completion framework called PIC-EC: parallel image completion networks with edge and color maps, which explicitly provides image edge and color information as the prior knowledge for image completion. The PIC-EC framework consists of the parallel edge and color generators followed by an image completion network. Specifically, the parallel paths generate edge and color maps for the missing region at the same time, and then the image completion network fills the missing region with fine details using the generated edge and color information as the priors. The proposed method was evaluated over CelebA-HQ and Paris StreetView datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that PIC-EC achieves superior performance on challenging cases with complex compositions and outperforms existing methods on evaluations of realism and accuracy, both quantitatively and qualitatively.