Model and dictionary guided face inpainting in the wild

Abstract

This work presents a method that can be used to inpaint occluded facial regions with unconstrained pose and orientation. This approach first warps the facial region onto a reference model to synthesize a frontal view. A modified Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) approach is then used to suppress warping errors. It then uses a novel local patch-based face inpainting algorithm which hallucinates missing pixels using a dictionary of face images which are pre-aligned to the same reference model. The hallucinated region is then warped back onto the original image to restore missing pixels.

Experimental results on synthetic occlusions demonstrate that the proposed face inpainting method has the best performance achieving PSNR gains of up to 0.74 dB over the second-best method. Moreover, experiments on the COFW dataset and a number of real-world images show that the proposed method successfully restores occluded facial regions in the wild even for CCTV quality images.