Semantic object removal with convolutional neural network feature-based inpainting approach

Object removal is a popular image manipulation technique, which mainly involves object segmentation and image inpainting two technical problems. In the conventional object removal framework, the object segmentation part needs a mask or artificial pre-processing; and the inpainting technique still requires further improving the quality. In this paper, we propose a new framework of object removal using the techniques of deep learning. Conditional random fields as recurrent neural networks (CRF-RNN) is used to segment the target in sematic, which can avoid the trouble of mask or artificial pre-processing for object segmentation. In inpainting part, a new method for inpainting the missing region is proposed. Besides, the representation features are calculated from the convolutional neural network (CNN) feature maps of the neighbor regions of the missing region. Then, large-scale bound-constrained optimization (L-BFGS) is used to synthesize the missing region based on the CNN representation features of similarity neighbor regions. We evaluate the proposed method by applying it to different kinds of images and textures for object removal and inpainting. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is better than the conventional method in terms of inpainting applications and object removal.