Interactive removal of microphone object in facial images

Abstract

Removing a specific object from an image and replacing the hole left behind with visually plausible backgrounds is a very intriguing task. While recent deep learning based object removal methods have shown promising results on this task for some structured scenes, none of them have addressed the problem of object removal in facial images. The objective of this work is to remove microphone object in facial images and fill hole with correct facial semantics and fine details. To make our solution practically useful, we present an interactive method called MRGAN, where the user roughly provides the microphone region. For filling the hole, we employ a Generative Adversarial Network based image-to-image translation approach. We break the problem into two stages: Inpainter and refiner. The inpainter estimates coarse prediction by roughly filling in the microphone region followed by the refiner which produces fine details under the microphone region. We unite perceptual loss, reconstruction loss and adversarial loss as joint loss function for generating a realistic face and similar structure to the ground truth. Because facial image pairs with or without microphone do not exist, we have trained our method on a synthetically generated microphone dataset from CelebA face images and evaluated on real world microphone images. Our extensive evaluation shows that MRGAN performs better than state-of-the-art image manipulation methods on real microphone images although we only train our method using the synthetic dataset created. Additionally, we provide ablation studies for the integrated loss function and for different network arrangements.