Neural Congealing: Aligning Images to a Joint Semantic Atlas

We present Neural Congealing -- a zero-shot self-supervised framework for detecting and jointly aligning semantically-common content across a given set of images. Our approach harnesses the power of pre-trained DINO-ViT features to learn: (i) a joint semantic atlas -- a 2D grid that captures the mode of DINO-ViT features in the input set, and (ii) dense mappings from the unified atlas to each of the input images. We derive a new robust self-supervised framework that optimizes the atlas representation and mappings per image set, requiring only a few real-world images as input without any additional input information (e.g., segmentation masks). Notably, we design our losses and training paradigm to account only for the shared content under severe variations in appearance, pose, background clutter or other distracting objects. We demonstrate results on a plethora of challenging image sets including sets of mixed domains (e.g., aligning images depicting sculpture and artwork of cats), sets depicting related yet different object categories (e.g., dogs and tigers), or domains for which large-scale training data is scarce (e.g., coffee mugs). We thoroughly evaluate our method and show that our test-time optimization approach performs favorably compared to a state-of-the-art method that requires extensive training on large-scale datasets.

Text2LIVE: Text-Driven Layered Image and Video Editing

We present a method for zero-shot, text-driven appearance manipulation in natural images and videos. Given an input image or video and a target text prompt, our goal is to edit the appearance of existing objects (e.g., object's texture) or augment the scene with visual effects (e.g., smoke, fire) in a semantically meaningful manner. We train a generator using an internal dataset of training examples, extracted from a single input (image or video and target text prompt), while leveraging an external pre-trained CLIP model to establish our losses. Rather than directly generating the edited output, our key idea is to generate an edit layer (color+opacity) that is composited over the original input. This allows us to constrain the generation process and maintain high fidelity to the original input via novel text-driven losses that are applied directly to the edit layer. Our method neither relies on a pre-trained generator nor requires user-provided edit masks. We demonstrate localized, semantic edits on high-resolution natural images and videos across a variety of objects and scenes.