Diverse Plausible 360-Degree Image Outpainting for Efficient 3DCG Background Creation

We address the problem of generating a 360-degree image from a single image with a narrow field of view by estimating its surroundings. Previous methods suffered from overfitting to the training resolution and deterministic generation. This paper proposes a completion method using a transformer for scene modeling and novel methods to improve the properties of a 360-degree image on the output image. Specifically, we use CompletionNets with a transformer to perform diverse completions and AdjustmentNet to match color, stitching, and resolution with an input image, enabling inference at any resolution. To improve the properties of a 360-degree image on an output image, we also propose WS-perceptual loss and circular inference. Thorough experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. For example, compared to SOTA methods, our method completes images 16 times larger in resolution and achieves 1.7 times lower Frechet inception distance (FID). Furthermore, we propose a pipeline that uses the completion results for lighting and background of 3DCG scenes. Our plausible background completion enables perceptually natural results in the application of inserting virtual objects with specular surfaces.

Reference-Based Video Colorization with Spatiotemporal Correspondence

We propose a novel reference-based video colorization framework with spatiotemporal correspondence. Reference-based methods colorize grayscale frames referencing a user input color frame. Existing methods suffer from the color leakage between objects and the emergence of average colors, derived from non-local semantic correspondence in space. To address this issue, we warp colors only from the regions on the reference frame restricted by correspondence in time. We propagate masks as temporal correspondences, using two complementary tracking approaches: off-the-shelf instance tracking for high performance segmentation, and newly proposed dense tracking to track various types of objects. By restricting temporally-related regions for referencing colors, our approach propagates faithful colors throughout the video. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively.

Fast Soft Color Segmentation

We address the problem of soft color segmentation, defined as decomposing a given image into several RGBA layers, each containing only homogeneous color regions. The resulting layers from decomposition pave the way for applications that benefit from layer-based editing, such as recoloring and compositing of images and videos. The current state-of-the-art approach for this problem is hindered by slow processing time due to its iterative nature, and consequently does not scale to certain real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a neural network based method for this task that decomposes a given image into multiple layers in a single forward pass. Furthermore, our method separately decomposes the color layers and the alpha channel layers. By leveraging a novel training objective, our method achieves proper assignment of colors amongst layers. As a consequence, our method achieve promising quality without existing issue of inference speed for iterative approaches. Our thorough experimental analysis shows that our method produces qualitative and quantitative results comparable to previous methods while achieving a 300,000x speed improvement. Finally, we utilize our proposed method on several applications, and demonstrate its speed advantage, especially in video editing.