GAF-GAN: Gated Attention Feature Fusion Image Inpainting Network Based on Generative Adversarial Network

Image inpainting, which aims to reconstruct reasonably clear and realistic images from known pixel information, is one of the core problems in computer vision. However, due to the complexity and variability of the underwater environment, the inability to extract valid pixel points and insufficient correlation between feature information in existing image inpainting techniques lead to blurring in the generated images. Therefore, a novel gated attention feature fusion image inpainting network based on generative adversarial networks (GAF-GAN) is proposed. The accuracy of feature similarity matching depends heavily on the validity of the information contained in the features. On the one hand, gating values are dynamically generated by gated convolution to reduce the interference of invalid information. On the other hand, semantic information at distant locations in an image is accurately acquired by the attention mechanism. For these reasons, we designed an improved gated attention mechanism. Gated attention mechanism make the network focus on effective information such as high-frequency texture and color fidelity of restored images. In addition, the dense feature fusion module is added to expand the overall receptive field of the network to fully learn the image features. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively repair defective images with complex texture structures and improve the reality and integrity of image details and structures.