Ancient paintings inpainting based on dual encoders and contextual information

Abstract Deep learning-based inpainting models have achieved success in restoring natural images, yet their application to ancient paintings encounters challenges due to the loss of texture, lines, and color. To address these issues, we introduce an ancient painting inpainting model based on dual encoders and contextual information to overcome the lack of feature extraction and detail texture recovery when restoring ancient paintings. Specifically, the proposed model employs a gated encoding branch that aims to minimize information loss and effectively capture semantic information from ancient paintings. A dense multi-scale feature fusion module is designed to extract texture and detail information at various scales, while dilated depthwise separable convolutions are utilized to reduce parameters and enhance computational efficiency. Furthermore, a contextual feature aggregation module is incorporated to extract contextual features, enhancing the overall consistency of the inpainting results. Finally, a color loss function is introduced to ensure color consistency in the restored area, harmonizing it with the surrounding region. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model effectively restores the texture details of ancient paintings, outperforming other methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Additionally, the model is tested on real damaged ancient paintings to validate its practicality and efficacy.