Image restoration for digital line drawings using line masks

The restoration of digital images holds practical significance due to the fact that degradation of digital image data on the internet is common. State-of-the-art image restoration methods usually employ end-to-end trained networks. However, we argue that a network trained with diverse image pairs is not optimal for restoring line drawings which have extensive plain backgrounds. We propose a line-drawing restoration framework which takes a restoration neural network as backbone and processes an input degraded line drawing in two steps. First, a proposed mask-predicting network predicts a line mask which indicates the possible location of foreground and background in the potential original line drawing. Next, we feed the degraded input line drawing together with the predicted line mask into the backbone restoration network. The traditional $L_1$ loss for the backbone restoration network is substituted with a masked Mean Square Error (MSE) loss. We test our framework on two classical image restoration tasks: JPEG restoration and super-resolution, and experiments demonstrate that our framework can achieve better quantitative and visual results in most cases.