A review of advances in image inpainting research

The aim of image inpainting is to fill in damaged areas according to certain rules based on information about the adjacent positions of missing areas and the overall structure of the image, a technique that plays a key role in various tasks in computer vision. With the rapid development of deep learning, researchers have combined it with image inpainting and achieved excellent performance. To gain insight into the techniques involved, this paper summarizes the latest research advances in the field of image inpainting. Firstly, existing classical image inpainting methods are reviewed, and traditional image inpainting methods and their advantages and disadvantages are introduced. Secondly, three classical network models are outlined, and the image inpainting methods are classified into single-stage, multi-stage and a priori condition-guided approaches according to different network types and model structures. Representative algorithms among them are selected and their important technical improvement ideas are analyzed and summarized. Then, the common datasets commonly used in image inpainting tasks and the evaluation metrics used to evaluate inpainting results are introduced. The paper presents a comprehensive summary of the various algorithms in terms of network models and inpainting methods, and selects representative algorithms for quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis. Finally, the future development trends and research directions have prospected, and the current problems of image inpainting are summarized.