Image outpainting: Hallucinating beyond the image

Abstract

Image inpainting is a technique that aims to fill in the missing regions with visually plausible content. However, an opposite idea, which is painting outside images, receives little work. In this study, we investigate the issue of image outpainting. Considering that the model needs better prediction ability as there is less neighboring information in image outpainting, the study proposes a novel image outpainting architecture that can obtain both deep model performance and detailed information. To fully take advantage of residual learning, dense residual (DR) learning is proposed and the image generative network is built on DR. To avoid losing subtle information caused by downsampling in encoder-decoder, shortcuts are added for transferring previous knowledge. Different from vanilla U-Net, we propose a skip method of the semi-complete form. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves excellent performance.