TransRef: Multi-Scale Reference Embedding Transformer for Reference-Guided Image Inpainting

TL;DR

TransRef introduces a multi-scale transformer-based approach for reference-guided image inpainting, effectively utilizing reference images to improve the completion of complex holes in corrupted images, supported by a new benchmark dataset.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel transformer-based network with reference-patch alignment and refinement modules for improved reference-guided image inpainting, along with a large benchmark dataset.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art in complex hole completion

Effective alignment and fusion of reference features

Benchmark dataset facilitates future research

Abstract

Image inpainting for completing complicated semantic environments and diverse hole patterns of corrupted images is challenging even for state-of-the-art learning-based inpainting methods trained on large-scale data. A reference image capturing the same scene of a corrupted image offers informative guidance for completing the corrupted image as it shares similar texture and structure priors to that of the holes of the corrupted image. In this work, we propose a transformer-based encoder-decoder network, named TransRef, for reference-guided image inpainting. Specifically, the guidance is conducted progressively through a reference embedding procedure, in which the referencing features are subsequently aligned and fused with the features of the corrupted image. For precise utilization of the reference features for guidance, a reference-patch alignment (Ref-PA) module is proposed to align the patch features of the reference and corrupted images and harmonize their style differences, while a reference-patch transformer (Ref-PT) module is proposed to refine the embedded reference feature. Moreover, to facilitate the research of reference-guided image restoration tasks, we construct a publicly accessible benchmark dataset containing 50K pairs of input and reference images. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of the reference information and the proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods in completing complex holes. Code and dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/Cameltr/TransRef.