Customizing Text-to-Image Diffusion with Camera Viewpoint Control

Model customization introduces new concepts to existing text-to-image models, enabling the generation of the new concept in novel contexts. However, such methods lack accurate camera view control w.r.t the object, and users must resort to prompt engineering (e.g., adding "top-view") to achieve coarse view control. In this work, we introduce a new task -- enabling explicit control of camera viewpoint for model customization. This allows us to modify object properties amongst various background scenes via text prompts, all while incorporating the target camera pose as additional control. This new task presents significant challenges in merging a 3D representation from the multi-view images of the new concept with a general, 2D text-to-image model. To bridge this gap, we propose to condition the 2D diffusion process on rendered, view-dependent features of the new object. During training, we jointly adapt the 2D diffusion modules and 3D feature predictions to reconstruct the object's appearance and geometry while reducing overfitting to the input multi-view images. Our method outperforms existing image editing and model personalization baselines in preserving the custom object's identity while following the input text prompt and the object's camera pose.

Spatial-Aware Image Retrieval: A Hyperdimensional Computing Approach for Efficient Similarity Hashing

In the face of burgeoning image data, efficiently retrieving similar images poses a formidable challenge. Past research has focused on refining hash functions to distill images into compact indicators of resemblance. Initial attempts used shallow models, evolving to attention mechanism-based architectures from Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to advanced models. Recognizing limitations in gradient-based models for spatial information embedding, we propose an innovative image hashing method, NeuroHash leveraging Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC). HDC symbolically encodes spatial information into high-dimensional vectors, reshaping image representation. Our approach combines pre-trained large vision models with HDC operations, enabling spatially encoded feature representations. Hashing with locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) ensures swift and efficient image retrieval. Notably, our framework allows dynamic hash manipulation for conditional image retrieval. Our work introduces a transformative image hashing framework enabling spatial-aware conditional retrieval. By seamlessly combining DNN-based neural and HDC-based symbolic models, our methodology breaks from traditional training, offering flexible and conditional image retrieval. Performance evaluations signify a paradigm shift in image-hashing methodologies, demonstrating enhanced retrieval accuracy.

Vocabulary-free Image Classification and Semantic Segmentation

Large vision-language models revolutionized image classification and semantic segmentation paradigms. However, they typically assume a pre-defined set of categories, or vocabulary, at test time for composing textual prompts. This assumption is impractical in scenarios with unknown or evolving semantic context. Here, we address this issue and introduce the Vocabulary-free Image Classification (VIC) task, which aims to assign a class from an unconstrained language-induced semantic space to an input image without needing a known vocabulary. VIC is challenging due to the vastness of the semantic space, which contains millions of concepts, including fine-grained categories. To address VIC, we propose Category Search from External Databases (CaSED), a training-free method that leverages a pre-trained vision-language model and an external database. CaSED first extracts the set of candidate categories from the most semantically similar captions in the database and then assigns the image to the best-matching candidate category according to the same vision-language model. Furthermore, we demonstrate that CaSED can be applied locally to generate a coarse segmentation mask that classifies image regions, introducing the task of Vocabulary-free Semantic Segmentation. CaSED and its variants outperform other more complex vision-language models, on classification and semantic segmentation benchmarks, while using much fewer parameters.

MOWA: Multiple-in-One Image Warping Model

While recent image warping approaches achieved remarkable success on existing benchmarks, they still require training separate models for each specific task and cannot generalize well to different camera models or customized manipulations. To address diverse types of warping in practice, we propose a Multiple-in-One image WArping model (named MOWA) in this work. Specifically, we mitigate the difficulty of multi-task learning by disentangling the motion estimation at both the region level and pixel level. To further enable dynamic task-aware image warping, we introduce a lightweight point-based classifier that predicts the task type, serving as prompts to modulate the feature maps for better estimation. To our knowledge, this is the first work that solves multiple practical warping tasks in one single model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MOWA, which is trained on six tasks for multiple-in-one image warping, outperforms state-of-the-art task-specific models across most tasks. Moreover, MOWA also exhibits promising potential to generalize into unseen scenes, as evidenced by cross-domain and zero-shot evaluations. The code will be made publicly available.

Boosting Medical Image Segmentation Performance with Adaptive Convolution Layer

Medical image segmentation plays a vital role in various clinical applications, enabling accurate delineation and analysis of anatomical structures or pathological regions. Traditional CNNs have achieved remarkable success in this field. However, they often rely on fixed kernel sizes, which can limit their performance and adaptability in medical images where features exhibit diverse scales and configurations due to variability in equipment, target sizes, and expert interpretations. In this paper, we propose an adaptive layer placed ahead of leading deep-learning models such as UCTransNet, which dynamically adjusts the kernel size based on the local context of the input image. By adaptively capturing and fusing features at multiple scales, our approach enhances the network's ability to handle diverse anatomical structures and subtle image details, even for recently performing architectures that internally implement intra-scale modules, such as UCTransnet. Extensive experiments are conducted on benchmark medical image datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposal. It consistently outperforms traditional \glspl{CNN} with fixed kernel sizes with a similar number of parameters, achieving superior segmentation Accuracy, Dice, and IoU in popular datasets such as SegPC2021 and ISIC2018. The model and data are published in the open-source repository, ensuring transparency and reproducibility of our promising results.

GenVideo: One-shot Target-image and Shape Aware Video Editing using T2I Diffusion Models

Video editing methods based on diffusion models that rely solely on a text prompt for the edit are hindered by the limited expressive power of text prompts. Thus, incorporating a reference target image as a visual guide becomes desirable for precise control over edit. Also, most existing methods struggle to accurately edit a video when the shape and size of the object in the target image differ from the source object. To address these challenges, we propose "GenVideo" for editing videos leveraging target-image aware T2I models. Our approach handles edits with target objects of varying shapes and sizes while maintaining the temporal consistency of the edit using our novel target and shape aware InvEdit masks. Further, we propose a novel target-image aware latent noise correction strategy during inference to improve the temporal consistency of the edits. Experimental analyses indicate that GenVideo can effectively handle edits with objects of varying shapes, where existing approaches fail.

Image Generative Semantic Communication with Multi-Modal Similarity Estimation for Resource-Limited Networks

To reduce network traffic and support environments with limited resources, a method for transmitting images with low amounts of transmission data is required. Machine learning-based image compression methods, which compress the data size of images while maintaining their features, have been proposed. However, in certain situations, reconstructing a part of semantic information of images at the receiver end may be sufficient. To realize this concept, semantic-information-based communication, called semantic communication, has been proposed, along with an image transmission method using semantic communication. This method transmits only the semantic information of an image, and the receiver reconstructs the image using an image-generation model. This method utilizes one type of semantic information, but reconstructing images similar to the original image using only it is challenging. This study proposes a multi-modal image transmission method that leverages diverse semantic information for efficient semantic communication. The proposed method extracts multi-modal semantic information from an image and transmits only it. Subsequently, the receiver generates multiple images using an image-generation model and selects an output based on semantic similarity. The receiver must select the output based only on the received features; however, evaluating semantic similarity using conventional metrics is challenging. Therefore, this study explored new metrics to evaluate the similarity between semantic features of images and proposes two scoring procedures. The results indicate that the proposed procedures can compare semantic similarities, such as position and composition, between semantic features of the original and generated images. Thus, the proposed method can facilitate the transmission and utilization of photographs through mobile networks for various service applications.

Adversarial Identity Injection for Semantic Face Image Synthesis

Nowadays, deep learning models have reached incredible performance in the task of image generation. Plenty of literature works address the task of face generation and editing, with human and automatic systems that struggle to distinguish what's real from generated. Whereas most systems reached excellent visual generation quality, they still face difficulties in preserving the identity of the starting input subject. Among all the explored techniques, Semantic Image Synthesis (SIS) methods, whose goal is to generate an image conditioned on a semantic segmentation mask, are the most promising, even though preserving the perceived identity of the input subject is not their main concern. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the problem of identity preservation in face image generation and present an SIS architecture that exploits a cross-attention mechanism to merge identity, style, and semantic features to generate faces whose identities are as similar as possible to the input ones. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method is not only suitable for preserving the identity but is also effective in the face recognition adversarial attack, i.e. hiding a second identity in the generated faces.

OmniSSR: Zero-shot Omnidirectional Image Super-Resolution using Stable Diffusion Model

Omnidirectional images (ODIs) are commonly used in real-world visual tasks, and high-resolution ODIs help improve the performance of related visual tasks. Most existing super-resolution methods for ODIs use end-to-end learning strategies, resulting in inferior realness of generated images and a lack of effective out-of-domain generalization capabilities in training methods. Image generation methods represented by diffusion model provide strong priors for visual tasks and have been proven to be effectively applied to image restoration tasks. Leveraging the image priors of the Stable Diffusion (SD) model, we achieve omnidirectional image super-resolution with both fidelity and realness, dubbed as OmniSSR. Firstly, we transform the equirectangular projection (ERP) images into tangent projection (TP) images, whose distribution approximates the planar image domain. Then, we use SD to iteratively sample initial high-resolution results. At each denoising iteration, we further correct and update the initial results using the proposed Octadecaplex Tangent Information Interaction (OTII) and Gradient Decomposition (GD) technique to ensure better consistency. Finally, the TP images are transformed back to obtain the final high-resolution results. Our method is zero-shot, requiring no training or fine-tuning. Experiments of our method on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

TextCenGen: Attention-Guided Text-Centric Background Adaptation for Text-to-Image Generation

Recent advancements in Text-to-image (T2I) generation have witnessed a shift from adapting text to fixed backgrounds to creating images around text. Traditional approaches are often limited to generate layouts within static images for effective text placement. Our proposed approach, TextCenGen, introduces a dynamic adaptation of the blank region for text-friendly image generation, emphasizing text-centric design and visual harmony generation. Our method employs force-directed attention guidance in T2I models to generate images that strategically reserve whitespace for pre-defined text areas, even for text or icons at the golden ratio. Observing how cross-attention maps affect object placement, we detect and repel conflicting objects using a force-directed graph approach, combined with a Spatial Excluding Cross-Attention Constraint for smooth attention in whitespace areas. As a novel task in graphic design, experiments indicate that TextCenGen outperforms existing methods with more harmonious compositions. Furthermore, our method significantly enhances T2I model outcomes on our specially collected prompt datasets, catering to varied text positions. These results demonstrate the efficacy of TextCenGen in creating more harmonious and integrated text-image compositions.