Image Inpainting Enhancement by Replacing the Original Mask with a Self-attended Region from the Input Image

Kiani, Kourosh; Rastgoo, Razieh; Chaji, Alireza; Escalera, Sergio

doi:10.22044/jadm.2025.15970.2713

Document Type : Original/Review Paper

Authors

¹ Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty, Semnan University, Semnan 3513119111, Iran.

² Department of Mathematics and Informatics, Universität de Barcelona, and Computer Vision Center, Barcelona, Spain.

10.22044/jadm.2025.15970.2713

Abstract

Image inpainting, the process of restoring missing or corrupted regions of an image by reconstructing pixel information, has recently seen considerable advancements through deep learning-based approaches. Aiming to tackle the complex spatial relationships within an image, in this paper, we introduce a novel deep learning-based pre-processing methodology for image inpainting utilizing the Vision Transformer (ViT). Unlike CNN-based methods, our approach leverages the self-attention mechanism of ViT to model global contextual dependencies, improving the quality of inpainted regions. Specifically, we replace masked pixel values with those generated by the ViT, utilizing the attention mechanism to extract diverse visual patches and capture discriminative spatial features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first instance of such a pre-processing model being proposed for image inpainting tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our methodology can be effectively applied using a pre-trained ViT model with a pre-defined patch size, reducing computational overhead while maintaining high reconstruction fidelity. To assess the generalization capability of the proposed methodology, we conduct extensive experiments comparing our approach with four standard inpainting models across four public datasets. The results validate the efficacy of our pre-processing technique in enhancing inpainting performance, particularly in scenarios involving complex textures and large missing regions.

Keywords

Main Subjects

H.6.5.2. Computer vision

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Image Inpainting Enhancement by Replacing the Original Mask with a Self-attended Region from the Input Image

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Volume 13, Issue 3July 2025Pages 379-391

Volume 13, Issue 3
July 2025
Pages 379-391