Eliminating the Cross-Domain Misalignment in Text-guided Image Inpainting

Text-guided image inpainting has rapidly garnered prominence as a task in user-directed image synthesis, aiming to complete the occluded image regions following the textual prompt provided. However, current methods usually grapple with issues arising from the disparity between low-level pixel data and high-level semantic descriptions, which results in inpainted sections not harmonizing with the original image (either structurally or texturally). In this study, we introduce a Structure-Aware Inpainting Learning scheme and an Asymmetric Cross Domain Attention to address these cross-domain misalignment challenges. The proposed structure-aware learning scheme employs features of an intermediate modality as structure guidance to bridge the gap between text information and low-level pixels. Meanwhile, asymmetric cross-domain attention enhances the texture consistency between inpainted and unmasked regions. Our experiments show exceptional performance on leading datasets such as MS-COCO and Open Images, surpassing state-of-the-art text-guided image inpainting methods. Code is released at: https://github.com/MucciH/ECDM-inpainting