Line Drawing Guided Progressive Inpainting of Mural Damages

Mural image inpainting refers to repairing the damage or missing areas in a mural image to restore the visual appearance. Most existing image-inpainting methods tend to take a target image as the only input and directly repair the damage to generate a visually plausible result. These methods obtain high performance in restoration or completion of some specific objects, e.g., human face, fabric texture, and printed texts, etc., however, are not suitable for repairing murals with varied subjects, especially for murals with large damaged areas. Moreover, due to the discrete colors in paints, mural inpainting may suffer from apparent color bias as compared to natural image inpainting. To this end, in this paper, we propose a line drawing guided progressive mural inpainting method. It divides the inpainting process into two steps: structure reconstruction and color correction, executed by a structure reconstruction network (SRN) and a color correction network (CCN), respectively. In the structure reconstruction, line drawings are used by SRN as a guarantee for large-scale content authenticity and structural stability. In the color correction, CCN operates a local color adjustment for missing pixels which reduces the negative effects of color bias and edge jumping. The proposed approach is evaluated against the current state-of-the-art image inpainting methods. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in mural image inpainting. The codes and data are available at {https://github.com/qinnzou/mural-image-inpainting}.