SEM-Net: Efficient Pixel Modelling for Image Inpainting with Spatially Enhanced SSM

Shuang Chen, Haozheng Zhang, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei, Hubert P. H. Shum; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 461-471

Image inpainting aims to repair a partially damaged image based on the information from known regions of the images. Achieving semantically plausible inpainting results is particularly challenging because it requires the reconstructed regions to exhibit similar patterns to the semantically consistent regions. This requires a model with a strong capacity to capture long-range dependencies. Existing models struggle in this regard due to the slow growth of receptive field for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) based methods and patch-level interactions in Transformer-based methods which are ineffective for capturing long-range dependencies. Motivated by this we propose SEM-Net a novel visual State Space model (SSM) vision network modelling corrupted images at the pixel level while capturing long-range dependencies (LRDs) in state space achieving a linear computational complexity. To address the inherent lack of spatial awareness in SSM we introduce the Snake Mamba Block (SMB) and Spatially-Enhanced Feedforward Network. These innovations enable SEM-Net to outperform state-of-the-art inpainting methods on two distinct datasets showing significant improvements in capturing LRDs and enhancement in spatial consistency. Additionally SEM-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on motion deblurring demonstrating its generalizability. Our source code is available:https://github.com/ChrisChen1023/SEM-Net.