Improving Image Inpainting via Adversarial Collaborative Training

Image inpainting aims to restore visually realistic contents from a corrupted image, while inpainting forensic methods focus on locating the inpainted regions to fight against inpainting manipulations. Motivated by these two mutually interdependent tasks, in this paper, we propose a novel image inpainting network called Adversarial Collaborative Network (AdvColabNet), which leverages the contradictory and collaborative information from the two tasks of image inpainting and inpainting forensics to enhance the progress of the inpainting model through adversarial collaborative training. Specifically, the proposed AdvColabNet is a coarse-to-fine two-stage framework. In the coarse training stage, a simple generative adversarial model-based U-Net-style network generates initial coarse inpainting results. In the fine stage, the authenticity of inpainting results is assessed using the estimated forensic mask. A forensics-driven adaptive weighting refinement strategy is developed to emphasize learning from pixels with higher probabilities of being inpainted, which helps the network to focus on the challenging regions, resulting in more plausible inpainting results. Comprehensive evaluations on the CelebA-HQ and Places2 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art robustness performance in terms of PSNR, SSIM, MAE, FID, and LPIPS metrics. We also show that our method effectively deceives the proposed inpainting forensic method compared to state-of-the-art inpainting methods, further demonstrating the superiority of the proposed method.