In an era where images and visual content dominate our digital landscape, the ability to manipulate and personalize these images has become a necessity. Envision seamlessly substituting a tabby cat lounging on a sunlit window sill in a photograph with your own playful puppy, all while preserving the original charm and composition of the image. We present Photoswap, a novel approach that enables this immersive image editing experience through personalized subject swapping in existing images. Photoswap first learns the visual concept of the subject from reference images and then swaps it into the target image using pre-trained diffusion models in a training-free manner. We establish that a well-conceptualized visual subject can be seamlessly transferred to any image with appropriate self-attention and cross-attention manipulation, maintaining the pose of the swapped subject and the overall coherence of the image. Comprehensive experiments underscore the efficacy and controllability of Photoswap in personalized subject swapping. Furthermore, Photoswap significantly outperforms baseline methods in human ratings across subject swapping, background preservation, and overall quality, revealing its vast application potential, from entertainment to professional editing.
Recent portrait relighting methods have achieved realistic results of portrait lighting effects given a desired lighting representation such as an environment map. However, these methods are not intuitive for user interaction and lack precise lighting control. We introduce LightPainter, a scribble-based relighting system that allows users to interactively manipulate portrait lighting effect with ease. This is achieved by two conditional neural networks, a delighting module that recovers geometry and albedo optionally conditioned on skin tone, and a scribble-based module for relighting. To train the relighting module, we propose a novel scribble simulation procedure to mimic real user scribbles, which allows our pipeline to be trained without any human annotations. We demonstrate high-quality and flexible portrait lighting editing capability with both quantitative and qualitative experiments. User study comparisons with commercial lighting editing tools also demonstrate consistent user preference for our method.
We present 3D Cinemagraphy, a new technique that marries 2D image animation with 3D photography. Given a single still image as input, our goal is to generate a video that contains both visual content animation and camera motion. We empirically find that naively combining existing 2D image animation and 3D photography methods leads to obvious artifacts or inconsistent animation. Our key insight is that representing and animating the scene in 3D space offers a natural solution to this task. To this end, we first convert the input image into feature-based layered depth images using predicted depth values, followed by unprojecting them to a feature point cloud. To animate the scene, we perform motion estimation and lift the 2D motion into the 3D scene flow. Finally, to resolve the problem of hole emergence as points move forward, we propose to bidirectionally displace the point cloud as per the scene flow and synthesize novel views by separately projecting them into target image planes and blending the results. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. A user study is also conducted to validate the compelling rendering results of our method.
Lighting effects such as shadows or reflections are key in making synthetic images realistic and visually appealing. To generate such effects, traditional computer graphics uses a physically-based renderer along with 3D geometry. To compensate for the lack of geometry in 2D Image compositing, recent deep learning-based approaches introduced a pixel height representation to generate soft shadows and reflections. However, the lack of geometry limits the quality of the generated soft shadows and constrain reflections to pure specular ones. We introduce PixHt-Lab, a system leveraging an explicit mapping from pixel height representation to 3D space. Using this mapping, PixHt-Lab reconstructs both the cutout and background geometry and renders realistic, diverse, lighting effects for image compositing. Given a surface with physically-based materials, we can render reflections with varying glossiness. To generate more realistic soft shadows, we further propose to use 3D-aware buffer channels to guide a neural renderer. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that PixHt-Lab significantly improves soft shadow generation.
Structure-guided image completion aims to inpaint a local region of an image according to an input guidance map from users. While such a task enables many practical applications for interactive editing, existing methods often struggle to hallucinate realistic object instances in complex natural scenes. Such a limitation is partially due to the lack of semantic-level constraints inside the hole region as well as the lack of a mechanism to enforce realistic object generation. In this work, we propose a learning paradigm that consists of semantic discriminators and object-level discriminators for improving the generation of complex semantics and objects. Specifically, the semantic discriminators leverage pretrained visual features to improve the realism of the generated visual concepts. Moreover, the object-level discriminators take aligned instances as inputs to enforce the realism of individual objects. Our proposed scheme significantly improves the generation quality and achieves state-of-the-art results on various tasks, including segmentation-guided completion, edge-guided manipulation and panoptically-guided manipulation on Places2 datasets. Furthermore, our trained model is flexible and can support multiple editing use cases, such as object insertion, replacement, removal and standard inpainting. In particular, our trained model combined with a novel automatic image completion pipeline achieves state-of-the-art results on the standard inpainting task.
Geometric camera calibration is often required for applications that understand the perspective of the image. We propose perspective fields as a representation that models the local perspective properties of an image. Perspective Fields contain per-pixel information about the camera view, parameterized as an up vector and a latitude value. This representation has a number of advantages as it makes minimal assumptions about the camera model and is invariant or equivariant to common image editing operations like cropping, warping, and rotation. It is also more interpretable and aligned with human perception. We train a neural network to predict Perspective Fields and the predicted Perspective Fields can be converted to calibration parameters easily. We demonstrate the robustness of our approach under various scenarios compared with camera calibration-based methods and show example applications in image compositing.
Object compositing based on 2D images is a challenging problem since it typically involves multiple processing stages such as color harmonization, geometry correction and shadow generation to generate realistic results. Furthermore, annotating training data pairs for compositing requires substantial manual effort from professionals, and is hardly scalable. Thus, with the recent advances in generative models, in this work, we propose a self-supervised framework for object compositing by leveraging the power of conditional diffusion models. Our framework can hollistically address the object compositing task in a unified model, transforming the viewpoint, geometry, color and shadow of the generated object while requiring no manual labeling. To preserve the input object's characteristics, we introduce a content adaptor that helps to maintain categorical semantics and object appearance. A data augmentation method is further adopted to improve the fidelity of the generator. Our method outperforms relevant baselines in both realism and faithfulness of the synthesized result images in a user study on various real-world images.
We propose a new framework for conditional image synthesis from semantic layouts of any precision levels, ranging from pure text to a 2D semantic canvas with precise shapes. More specifically, the input layout consists of one or more semantic regions with free-form text descriptions and adjustable precision levels, which can be set based on the desired controllability. The framework naturally reduces to text-to-image (T2I) at the lowest level with no shape information, and it becomes segmentation-to-image (S2I) at the highest level. By supporting the levels in-between, our framework is flexible in assisting users of different drawing expertise and at different stages of their creative workflow. We introduce several novel techniques to address the challenges coming with this new setup, including a pipeline for collecting training data; a precision-encoded mask pyramid and a text feature map representation to jointly encode precision level, semantics, and composition information; and a multi-scale guided diffusion model to synthesize images. To evaluate the proposed method, we collect a test dataset containing user-drawn layouts with diverse scenes and styles. Experimental results show that the proposed method can generate high-quality images following the layout at given precision, and compares favorably against existing methods. Project page \url{https://zengxianyu.github.io/scenec/}
Developing a safe, stable, and efficient obstacle avoidance policy in crowded and narrow scenarios for multiple robots is challenging. Most existing studies either use centralized control or need communication with other robots. In this paper, we propose a novel logarithmic map-based deep reinforcement learning method for obstacle avoidance in complex and communication-free multi-robot scenarios. In particular, our method converts laser information into a logarithmic map. As a step toward improving training speed and generalization performance, our policies will be trained in two specially designed multi-robot scenarios. Compared to other methods, the logarithmic map can represent obstacles more accurately and improve the success rate of obstacle avoidance. We finally evaluate our approach under a variety of simulation and real-world scenarios. The results show that our method provides a more stable and effective navigation solution for robots in complex multi-robot scenarios and pedestrian scenarios. Videos are available at https://youtu.be/r0EsUXe6MZE.