IMPRINT: Generative Object Compositing by Learning Identity-Preserving Representation

Generative object compositing emerges as a promising new avenue for compositional image editing. However, the requirement of object identity preservation poses a significant challenge, limiting practical usage of most existing methods. In response, this paper introduces IMPRINT, a novel diffusion-based generative model trained with a two-stage learning framework that decouples learning of identity preservation from that of compositing. The first stage is targeted for context-agnostic, identity-preserving pretraining of the object encoder, enabling the encoder to learn an embedding that is both view-invariant and conducive to enhanced detail preservation. The subsequent stage leverages this representation to learn seamless harmonization of the object composited to the background. In addition, IMPRINT incorporates a shape-guidance mechanism offering user-directed control over the compositing process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IMPRINT significantly outperforms existing methods and various baselines on identity preservation and composition quality.

Latent Feature-Guided Diffusion Models for Shadow Removal

Recovering textures under shadows has remained a challenging problem due to the difficulty of inferring shadow-free scenes from shadow images. In this paper, we propose the use of diffusion models as they offer a promising approach to gradually refine the details of shadow regions during the diffusion process. Our method improves this process by conditioning on a learned latent feature space that inherits the characteristics of shadow-free images, thus avoiding the limitation of conventional methods that condition on degraded images only. Additionally, we propose to alleviate potential local optima during training by fusing noise features with the diffusion network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach which outperforms the previous best method by 13% in terms of RMSE on the AISTD dataset. Further, we explore instance-level shadow removal, where our model outperforms the previous best method by 82% in terms of RMSE on the DESOBA dataset.

SCoRD: Subject-Conditional Relation Detection with Text-Augmented Data

We propose Subject-Conditional Relation Detection SCoRD, where conditioned on an input subject, the goal is to predict all its relations to other objects in a scene along with their locations. Based on the Open Images dataset, we propose a challenging OIv6-SCoRD benchmark such that the training and testing splits have a distribution shift in terms of the occurrence statistics of $\langle$subject, relation, object$\rangle$ triplets. To solve this problem, we propose an auto-regressive model that given a subject, it predicts its relations, objects, and object locations by casting this output as a sequence of tokens. First, we show that previous scene-graph prediction methods fail to produce as exhaustive an enumeration of relation-object pairs when conditioned on a subject on this benchmark. Particularly, we obtain a recall@3 of 83.8% for our relation-object predictions compared to the 49.75% obtained by a recent scene graph detector. Then, we show improved generalization on both relation-object and object-box predictions by leveraging during training relation-object pairs obtained automatically from textual captions and for which no object-box annotations are available. Particularly, for $\langle$subject, relation, object$\rangle$ triplets for which no object locations are available during training, we are able to obtain a recall@3 of 42.59% for relation-object pairs and 32.27% for their box locations.

GamutMLP: A Lightweight MLP for Color Loss Recovery

Cameras and image-editing software often process images in the wide-gamut ProPhoto color space, encompassing 90% of all visible colors. However, when images are encoded for sharing, this color-rich representation is transformed and clipped to fit within the small-gamut standard RGB (sRGB) color space, representing only 30% of visible colors. Recovering the lost color information is challenging due to the clipping procedure. Inspired by neural implicit representations for 2D images, we propose a method that optimizes a lightweight multi-layer-perceptron (MLP) model during the gamut reduction step to predict the clipped values. GamutMLP takes approximately 2 seconds to optimize and requires only 23 KB of storage. The small memory footprint allows our GamutMLP model to be saved as metadata in the sRGB image -- the model can be extracted when needed to restore wide-gamut color values. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for color recovery and compare it with alternative strategies, including pre-trained DNN-based gamut expansion networks and other implicit neural representation methods. As part of this effort, we introduce a new color gamut dataset of 2200 wide-gamut/small-gamut images for training and testing. Our code and dataset can be found on the project website: https://gamut-mlp.github.io.

TopNet: Transformer-based Object Placement Network for Image Compositing

We investigate the problem of automatically placing an object into a background image for image compositing. Given a background image and a segmented object, the goal is to train a model to predict plausible placements (location and scale) of the object for compositing. The quality of the composite image highly depends on the predicted location/scale. Existing works either generate candidate bounding boxes or apply sliding-window search using global representations from background and object images, which fail to model local information in background images. However, local clues in background images are important to determine the compatibility of placing the objects with certain locations/scales. In this paper, we propose to learn the correlation between object features and all local background features with a transformer module so that detailed information can be provided on all possible location/scale configurations. A sparse contrastive loss is further proposed to train our model with sparse supervision. Our new formulation generates a 3D heatmap indicating the plausibility of all location/scale combinations in one network forward pass, which is over 10 times faster than the previous sliding-window method. It also supports interactive search when users provide a pre-defined location or scale. The proposed method can be trained with explicit annotation or in a self-supervised manner using an off-the-shelf inpainting model, and it outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly. The user study shows that the trained model generalizes well to real-world images with diverse challenging scenes and object categories.

Structure-Guided Image Completion with Image-level and Object-level Semantic Discriminators

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.

ObjectStitch: Generative Object 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.

GALA: Toward Geometry-and-Lighting-Aware Object Search for Compositing

Compositing-aware object search aims to find the most compatible objects for compositing given a background image and a query bounding box. Previous works focus on learning compatibility between the foreground object and background, but fail to learn other important factors from large-scale data, i.e. geometry and lighting. To move a step further, this paper proposes GALA (Geometry-and-Lighting-Aware), a generic foreground object search method with discriminative modeling on geometry and lighting compatibility for open-world image compositing. Remarkably, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the CAIS dataset and generalizes well on large-scale open-world datasets, i.e. Pixabay and Open Images. In addition, our method can effectively handle non-box scenarios, where users only provide background images without any input bounding box. A web demo (see supplementary materials) is built to showcase applications of the proposed method for compositing-aware search and automatic location/scale prediction for the foreground object.

CM-GAN: Image Inpainting with Cascaded Modulation GAN and Object-Aware Training

Recent image inpainting methods have made great progress but often struggle to generate plausible image structures when dealing with large holes in complex images. This is partially due to the lack of effective network structures that can capture both the long-range dependency and high-level semantics of an image. To address these problems, we propose cascaded modulation GAN (CM-GAN), a new network design consisting of an encoder with Fourier convolution blocks that extract multi-scale feature representations from the input image with holes and a StyleGAN-like decoder with a novel cascaded global-spatial modulation block at each scale level. In each decoder block, global modulation is first applied to perform coarse semantic-aware structure synthesis, then spatial modulation is applied on the output of global modulation to further adjust the feature map in a spatially adaptive fashion. In addition, we design an object-aware training scheme to prevent the network from hallucinating new objects inside holes, fulfilling the needs of object removal tasks in real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments are conducted to show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluation.