Deep Portrait Image Completion and Extrapolation

IEEE Trans Image Process. 2019 Oct 11. doi: 10.1109/TIP.2019.2945866. Online ahead of print.

Abstract

General image completion and extrapolation methods often fail on portrait images where parts of the human body need to be recovered -a task that requires accurate human body structure and appearance synthesis. We present a twostage deep learning framework for tackling this problem. In the first stage, given a portrait image with an incomplete human body, we extract a complete, coherent human body structure through a human parsing network, which focuses on structure recovery inside the unknown region with the help of full-body pose estimation. In the second stage, we use an image completion network to fill the unknown region, guided by the structure map recovered in the first stage. For realistic synthesis the completion network is trained with both perceptual loss and conditional adversarial loss.We further propose a face refinement network to improve the fidelity of the synthesized face region. We evaluate our method on publicly-available portrait image datasets, and show that it outperforms other state-of-the-art general image completion methods. Our method enables new portrait image editing applications such as occlusion removal and portrait extrapolation. We further show that the proposed general learning framework can be applied to other types of images, e.g. animal images.