Controlling Character Motions without Observable Driving Source

How to generate diverse, life-like, and unlimited long head/body sequences without any driving source? We argue that this under-investigated research problem is non-trivial at all, and has unique technical challenges behind it. Without semantic constraints from the driving sources, using the standard autoregressive model to generate infinitely long sequences would easily result in 1) out-of-distribution (OOD) issue due to the accumulated error, 2) insufficient diversity to produce natural and life-like motion sequences and 3) undesired periodic patterns along the time. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a systematic framework that marries the benefits of VQ-VAE and a novel token-level control policy trained with reinforcement learning using carefully designed reward functions. A high-level prior model can be easily injected on top to generate unlimited long and diverse sequences. Although we focus on no driving sources now, our framework can be generalized for controlled synthesis with explicit driving sources. Through comprehensive evaluations, we conclude that our proposed framework can address all the above-mentioned challenges and outperform other strong baselines very significantly.

Deep Image Harmonization via Domain Verification

Image composition is an important operation in image processing, but the inconsistency between foreground and background significantly degrades the quality of composite image. Image harmonization, aiming to make the foreground compatible with the background, is a promising yet challenging task. However, the lack of high-quality publicly available dataset for image harmonization greatly hinders the development of image harmonization techniques. In this work, we contribute an image harmonization dataset by generating synthesized composite images based on COCO (resp., Adobe5k, Flickr, day2night) dataset, leading to our HCOCO (resp., HAdobe5k, HFlickr, Hday2night) sub-dataset. Moreover, we propose a new deep image harmonization method with a novel domain verification discriminator, enlightened by the following insight. Specifically, incompatible foreground and background belong to two different domains, so we need to translate the domain of foreground to the same domain as background. Our proposed domain verification discriminator can play such a role by pulling close the domains of foreground and background. Extensive experiments on our constructed dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our dataset is released in https://github.com/bcmi/Image_Harmonization_Datasets.

Image Harmonization Datasets: HCOCO, HAdobe5k, HFlickr, and Hday2night

Image composition is an important operation in image processing, but the inconsistency between foreground and background significantly degrades the quality of composite image. Image harmonization, which aims to make the foreground compatible with the background, is a promising yet challenging task. However, the lack of high-quality public dataset for image harmonization, which significantly hinders the development of image harmonization techniques. Therefore, we create synthesized composite images based on existing COCO (resp., Adobe5k, day2night) dataset, leading to our HCOCO (resp., HAdobe5k, Hday2night) dataset. To enrich the diversity of our datasets, we also generate synthesized composite images based on our collected Flick images, leading to our HFlickr dataset. All four datasets are released in https://github.com/bcmi/Image_Harmonization_Datasets.