Automatic high-quality rendering of anime scenes from complex real-world images is of significant practical value. The challenges of this task lie in the complexity of the scenes, the unique features of anime style, and the lack of high-quality datasets to bridge the domain gap. Despite promising attempts, previous efforts are still incompetent in achieving satisfactory results with consistent semantic preservation, evident stylization, and fine details. In this study, we propose Scenimefy, a novel semi-supervised image-to-image translation framework that addresses these challenges. Our approach guides the learning with structure-consistent pseudo paired data, simplifying the pure unsupervised setting. The pseudo data are derived uniquely from a semantic-constrained StyleGAN leveraging rich model priors like CLIP. We further apply segmentation-guided data selection to obtain high-quality pseudo supervision. A patch-wise contrastive style loss is introduced to improve stylization and fine details. Besides, we contribute a high-resolution anime scene dataset to facilitate future research. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both perceptual quality and quantitative performance.
While high fidelity and efficiency are central to the creation of digital head avatars, recent methods relying on 2D or 3D generative models often experience limitations such as shape distortion, expression inaccuracy, and identity flickering. Additionally, existing one-shot inversion techniques fail to fully leverage multiple input images for detailed feature extraction. We propose a novel framework, \textbf{Incremental 3D GAN Inversion}, that enhances avatar reconstruction performance using an algorithm designed to increase the fidelity from multiple frames, resulting in improved reconstruction quality proportional to frame count. Our method introduces a unique animatable 3D GAN prior with two crucial modifications for enhanced expression controllability alongside an innovative neural texture encoder that categorizes texture feature spaces based on UV parameterization. Differentiating from traditional techniques, our architecture emphasizes pixel-aligned image-to-image translation, mitigating the need to learn correspondences between observation and canonical spaces. Furthermore, we incorporate ConvGRU-based recurrent networks for temporal data aggregation from multiple frames, boosting geometry and texture detail reconstruction. The proposed paradigm demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on one-shot and few-shot avatar animation tasks.
On shopping websites, product images of low quality negatively affect customer experience. Although there are plenty of work in detecting images with different defects, few efforts have been dedicated to correct those defects at scale. A major challenge is that there are thousands of product types and each has specific defects, therefore building defect specific models is unscalable. In this paper, we propose a unified Image-to-Image (I2I) translation model to correct multiple defects across different product types. Our model leverages an attention mechanism to hierarchically incorporate high-level defect groups and specific defect types to guide the network to focus on defect-related image regions. Evaluated on eight public datasets, our model reduces the Frechet Inception Distance (FID) by 24.6% in average compared with MoNCE, the state-of-the-art I2I method. Unlike public data, another practical challenge on shopping websites is that some paired images are of low quality. Therefore we design our model to be semi-paired by combining the L1 loss of paired data with the cycle loss of unpaired data. Tested on a shopping website dataset to correct three image defects, our model reduces (FID) by 63.2% in average compared with WS-I2I, the state-of-the art semi-paired I2I method.
Recent score-based diffusion models (SBDMs) show promising results in unpaired image-to-image translation (I2I). However, existing methods, either energy-based or statistically-based, provide no explicit form of the interfered intermediate generative distributions. This work presents a new score-decomposed diffusion model (SDDM) on manifolds to explicitly optimize the tangled distributions during image generation. SDDM derives manifolds to make the distributions of adjacent time steps separable and decompose the score function or energy guidance into an image ``denoising" part and a content ``refinement" part. To refine the image in the same noise level, we equalize the refinement parts of the score function and energy guidance, which permits multi-objective optimization on the manifold. We also leverage the block adaptive instance normalization module to construct manifolds with lower dimensions but still concentrated with the perturbed reference image. SDDM outperforms existing SBDM-based methods with much fewer diffusion steps on several I2I benchmarks.
We present a novel algorithm for text-driven image-to-image translation based on a pretrained text-to-image diffusion model. Our method aims to generate a target image by selectively editing the regions of interest in a source image, defined by a modifying text, while preserving the remaining parts. In contrast to existing techniques that solely rely on a target prompt, we introduce a new score function, which considers both a source prompt and a source image, tailored to address specific translation tasks. To this end, we derive the conditional score function in a principled manner, decomposing it into a standard score and a guiding term for target image generation. For the gradient computation, we adopt a Gaussian distribution of the posterior distribution, estimating its mean and variance without requiring additional training. In addition, to enhance the conditional score guidance, we incorporate a simple yet effective mixup method. This method combines two cross-attention maps derived from the source and target latents, promoting the generation of the target image by a desirable fusion of the original parts in the source image and the edited regions aligned with the target prompt. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach achieves outstanding image-to-image translation performance on various tasks.
Image-to-image (I2I) translation comprises a wide spectrum of tasks. Here we divide this problem into three levels: strong-fidelity translation, normal-fidelity translation, and weak-fidelity translation, indicating the extent to which the content of the original image is preserved. Although existing methods achieve good performance in weak-fidelity translation, they fail to fully preserve the content in both strong- and normal-fidelity tasks, e.g. sim2real, style transfer and low-level vision. In this work, we propose Hierarchy Flow, a novel flow-based model to achieve better content preservation during translation. Specifically, 1) we first unveil the drawbacks of standard flow-based models when applied to I2I translation. 2) Next, we propose a new design, namely hierarchical coupling for reversible feature transformation and multi-scale modeling, to constitute Hierarchy Flow. 3) Finally, we present a dedicated aligned-style loss for a better trade-off between content preservation and stylization during translation. Extensive experiments on a wide range of I2I translation benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, with convincing advantages in both strong- and normal-fidelity tasks. Code and models will be at https://github.com/WeichenFan/HierarchyFlow.
Accurately modeling protein 3D structure is essential for the design of functional proteins. An important sub-task of structure modeling is protein side-chain packing: predicting the conformation of side-chains (rotamers) given the protein's backbone structure and amino-acid sequence. Conventional approaches for this task rely on expensive sampling procedures over hand-crafted energy functions and rotamer libraries. Recently, several deep learning methods have been developed to tackle the problem in a data-driven way, albeit with vastly different formulations (from image-to-image translation to directly predicting atomic coordinates). Here, we frame the problem as a joint regression over the side-chains' true degrees of freedom: the dihedral $\chi$ angles. We carefully study possible objective functions for this task, while accounting for the underlying symmetries of the task. We propose Holographic Packer (H-Packer), a novel two-stage algorithm for side-chain packing built on top of two light-weight rotationally equivariant neural networks. We evaluate our method on CASP13 and CASP14 targets. H-Packer is computationally efficient and shows favorable performance against conventional physics-based algorithms and is competitive against alternative deep learning solutions.
Recent advances in deep learning have witnessed many successful unsupervised image-to-image translation models that learn correspondences between two visual domains without paired data. However, it is still a great challenge to build robust mappings between various domains especially for those with drastic visual discrepancies. In this paper, we introduce a novel versatile framework, Generative Prior-guided UNsupervised Image-to-image Translation (GP-UNIT), that improves the quality, applicability and controllability of the existing translation models. The key idea of GP-UNIT is to distill the generative prior from pre-trained class-conditional GANs to build coarse-level cross-domain correspondences, and to apply the learned prior to adversarial translations to excavate fine-level correspondences. With the learned multi-level content correspondences, GP-UNIT is able to perform valid translations between both close domains and distant domains. For close domains, GP-UNIT can be conditioned on a parameter to determine the intensity of the content correspondences during translation, allowing users to balance between content and style consistency. For distant domains, semi-supervised learning is explored to guide GP-UNIT to discover accurate semantic correspondences that are hard to learn solely from the appearance. We validate the superiority of GP-UNIT over state-of-the-art translation models in robust, high-quality and diversified translations between various domains through extensive experiments.
Generative models have increasingly impacted relative tasks ranging from image revision and object detection in computer vision to interior design and idea illustration in more general fields. Stable diffusion is an outstanding model series that paves the way for producing high-resolution images with thorough details from text prompts or reference images. It will be an interesting topic about how to leverage the capability of stable diffusion to elevate the image variations of certain categories (e.g., vehicles, humans, and daily objects); particularly, it has the potential to gain improvements for small datasets with image-sparse categories. This study utilized seven categories in the popular COCO dataset and three widespread weed species in Michigan to evaluate the efficiency of a recent version of stable diffusion. In detail, Stable diffusion was used to generate synthetic images belonging to these classes; then, YOLOv8 models were trained based on these synthetic images, whose performance was compared to the models trained on original images. In addition, several techniques (e.g., Image-to-image translation, Dreambooth, ControlNet) of Stable diffusion were leveraged for image generation with different focuses. In spite of the overall results being disappointing, promising results have been achieved in some classes, illustrating the potential of stable diffusion models to improve the performance of detection models, which represent more helpful information being conveyed into the models by the generated images. This seminal study may expedite the adaption of stable diffusion models to classification and detection tasks in different fields.
Marine snow, the floating particles in underwater images, severely degrades the visibility and performance of human and machine vision systems. This paper proposes a novel method to reduce the marine snow interference using deep learning techniques. We first synthesize realistic marine snow samples by training a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model and combine them with natural underwater images to create a paired dataset. We then train a U-Net model to perform marine snow removal as an image to image translation task. Our experiments show that the U-Net model can effectively remove both synthetic and natural marine snow with high accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as the Median filter and its adaptive variant. We also demonstrate the robustness of our method by testing it on the MSRB dataset, which contains synthetic artifacts that our model has not seen during training. Our method is a practical and efficient solution for enhancing underwater images affected by marine snow.