With the rapid development of generative adversarial networks, many image restoration problems that are difficult to solve based on traditional methods have gained new research approaches. With its powerful generation ability, generative adversarial networks can restore intact images from damaged images, so they are widely used in image restoration. In order to summarize the relevant theories and research on the problem of using generative adversarial networks to repair damaged images in recent years, based on the categories of damaged images and their adapted repair methods, the applications of image restoration are divided into three main aspects: image inpainting, image deblurring, and image denoising. For each aspect, the applications are further subdivided through technical principles, application objects and other dimensions. For the field of image inpainting, different image completion methods based on generative adversarial networks are discussed from the perspectives of using conditional guidance and latent coding. For the field of image deblurring, the essential differences between motion blurred images and static blurred images and their repair methods are explained. For the field of image denoising, personalized denoising methods for different categories of images are summarized. For each type of applications, the characteristics of the specific GAN models employed are summarized. Finally, the advantages and disadvantages of GAN applied to image restoration are summarized, and the future application scenarios are prospected.
