Recurrent deep neural network system for detecting overlays in images

A non-transitory computer-readable medium having stored thereon program instructions that upon execution by a processor, cause the processor to perform a set of acts comprising:

• applying a feature map network to an image to create a feature map, wherein the feature map includes data characterizing a feature in the image relative to other features in the image;
• applying a probability map network to the feature map to create a probability map assigning a probability to the feature in the image, wherein the assigned probability corresponds to a likelihood that the feature is an overlay;
• determining that the assigned probability exceeds a threshold probability value;
• and
• responsive to determining that the assigned probability exceeds the threshold probability value, (i) removing the at least one feature from the image or (ii) inpainting the at least one feature.

A system, comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a non-transitory computer-readable medium having stored thereon program instructions that, upon execution by the processor, cause the processor to perform a set of acts comprising:
• training a feature map network by generating a plurality of groundtruth masks from a corresponding plurality of training images, wherein each of the plurality of training images has an overlay with at least one of a respective grayscale intensity, color hue, color value, color intensity, opacity, size, or position that differs relative to other overlays in the plurality of training images;
• applying the trained feature map network to an image to create a feature map, wherein the feature map includes data characterizing a feature in the image relative to other features in the image, wherein the feature map network comprises a very deep convolutional neural network having a plurality of convolutional layers and max-pooling layers;
• applying a probability map network to the feature map to create a probability map, wherein the probability map network comprises at least two recurrent layers including at least one vertical recurrent layer and at least one horizontal recurrent layer that are multiplied to provide an output indicative of a probability that the feature in the image is an overlay;
• determining that the probability exceeds a threshold probability value;
• and
• responsive to determining that the probability exceeds the threshold probability value, (i) removing the feature from the image or (ii) inpainting the feature.