W-Net: Structure and Texture Interaction for Image Inpainting

Recent literature has developed two advanced tools for image inpainting: appearance propagation and attention matching. However, given the ineffective feature reorganization and vulnerable attention maps, existing works yield suboptimal results with distorted structures and inconsistent contents. Furthermore, we observe that deep sampling layers (DSL) and shallow skip connections (SSC) in U-Net separately promote image structure inference and texture synthesis. To address the above two issues, we devise a W-shaped network (W-Net), which consists of two key components: a texture spatial attention (TSA) module in SSC and a structure channel excitation (SCE) module in DSL. W-Net is a two-stage network, with coarse and refined structures derived at each stage. Meanwhile, the TSA module fills incomplete textures with reliable attention scores under the guidance of coarse structures, which effectively diminishes inconsistency from appearance to semantics. The SCE module rectifies structures according to the difference between coarse structures and refined structures enhanced by texture features. Then the module motivates them to produce more reasonable shapes. Complete textures and refined structures constitute desired inpainted images, as the output of W-Net. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the superior performance of W-Net.