Dual-path Image Inpainting with Auxiliary GAN Inversion

Deep image inpainting can inpaint a corrupted image using a feed-forward inference, but still fails to handle large missing area or complex semantics. Recently, GAN inversion based inpainting methods propose to leverage semantic information in pretrained generator (e.g., StyleGAN) to solve the above issues. Different from feed-forward methods, they seek for a closest latent code to the corrupted image and feed it to a pretrained generator. However, inferring the latent code is either time-consuming or inaccurate. In this paper, we develop a dual-path inpainting network with inversion path and feed-forward path, in which inversion path provides auxiliary information to help feed-forward path. We also design a novel deformable fusion module to align the feature maps in two paths. Experiments on FFHQ and LSUN demonstrate that our method is effective in solving the aforementioned problems while producing more realistic results than state-of-the-art methods.