A Novel GAN-Based Network for Unmasking of Masked Face

Recent deep learning based image editing methods have achieved promising results for removing object in an image but fail to generate plausible results for removing large objects of complex nature, especially in facial images. The objective of this work is to remove mask objects in facial images. This problem is challenging because (1) most of the time facial masks cover quite a large region of face that even extends beyond the actual face boundary below chin, and (2) facial image pairs with and without mask object do not exist for training. We break the problem into two stages: mask object detection and image completion of the removed mask region. The first stage of our model automatically produces binary segmentation for the mask region. Then, the second stage removes the mask and synthesizes the affected region with fine details while retaining the global coherency of face structure. For this, we have employed a GAN-based network using two discriminators where one discriminator helps learn the global structure of the face and then another discriminator comes in to focus learning on the deep missing region. To train our model in a supervised manner, we create a paired synthetic dataset using publicly available CelebA dataset and evaluated on real world images collected from the Internet. Our model outperforms others representative state-of-the-art approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively.