Dunhuang mural inpainting based on reference guidance and multi‐scale fusion

Abstract In response to the inadequate utilization of prior information in current mural inpainting processes, leading to issues such as semantically unreliable inpaintings and the presence of artifacts in the inpainting area, a Dunhuang mural inpainting method based on reference guidance and multi‐scale feature fusion is proposed. First, the simulated broken mural, the mask image, and the reference mural are input into the model to complete the multi‐level embedding of patches and align the multi‐scale fine‐grained features of damaged murals and reference murals. Following the patch embedding module, a hybrid residual module is added based on hybrid attention to fully extract mural features. In addition, by continuing the residual concatenation of outputs of the hierarchical embedding module improves the ability of the model to represent deeper features, and improves the robustness and generalisation of the model. Second, the encoded features are fed into the decoder to generate decoded features. Finally, the convolutional tail is employed to propagate them and complete the mural painting. Experimental validation on the Dunhuang mural dataset demonstrates that, compared to other algorithms, this model exhibits higher evaluation metrics in the inpainting of extensively damaged murals and demonstrates overall robustness. In terms of visual effects, the results of this model in the inpainting process exhibit finer textures, richer semantic information, more coherent edge structures, and a closer resemblance to authentic murals.