De-Occlusion Face Model based on Deep Occlusor Segmentation and Deep Inpainting Models

Image inpainting is a computer vision task that reconstructs missing image regions. Given its potential for various applications, it is an area of great interest. Despite advances in this field thanks to deep models such as autoencoders and generative adversarial networks, fundamental challenges persist, such as the causal interpretation of information loss and the risk of overfitting and lack of diversity in the features obtained with autoencoders. In this context, this article presents an innovative deep network model to solve occluded face inpainting. The model focuses on attributing the loss of information to the occlusion. The proposed model consists of two deep models: one for segmenting the object occluding the face, called SOCLNET, and another for reconstructing the face, IFACENET. SOCLNET is an improvement of the DeepLabv3 network by adding self-attention mechanisms. IFACENET is based on an autoencoder with an ensemble learning approach in the encoder to improve the diversity of the extracted features. SOCLNET was evaluated to demonstrate that the segmentation of occluding objects works adequately, even on out-of-distribution images. Its performance metrics were Pixel Accuracy = 0.93 and IoU = 0.788. The IFACENET model was compared against other state-of-the-art models using the Celeb-HQ database. The quantitative results of IFACENET show an average performance of SSIM = 0.95, PSNR = 26.813, and L1 = 0.261 with different mask values, being competitive with the state of the art. Additionally, qualitative results of IFACENET are shown to demonstrate the visual outcomes of face inpainting. Based on those results, it can be concluded that the proposed model effectively solves the reconstruction of occluded faces, opening new perspectives in the research of image reconstruction.