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May 28, 2024
In recent years, the increasing demand for dynamic 3D assets in design and gaming applications has given rise to powerful generative pipelines capable of synthesizing high-quality 4D objects. Previous methods generally rely on score distillation sampling (SDS) algorithm to infer the unseen views and motion of 4D objects, thus leading to unsatisfactory results with defects like over-saturation and Janus problem. Therefore, inspired by recent progress of video diffusion models, we propose to optimize a 4D representation by explicitly generating multi-view videos from one input image. However, it is far from trivial to handle practical challenges faced by such a pipeline, including dramatic temporal inconsistency, inter-frame geometry and texture diversity, and semantic defects brought by video generation results. To address these issues, we propose DG4D, a novel multi-stage framework that generates high-quality and consistent 4D assets without score distillation. Specifically, collaborative techniques and solutions are developed, including an attention injection strategy to synthesize temporal-consistent multi-view videos, a robust and efficient dynamic reconstruction method based on Gaussian Splatting, and a refinement stage with diffusion prior for semantic restoration. The qualitative results and user preference study demonstrate that our framework outperforms the baselines in generation quality by a considerable margin. Code will be released at \url{https://github.com/jasongzy/EG4D}.
PPRSteg: Printing and Photography Robust QR Code Steganography via Attention Flow-Based Model
May 26, 2024Image steganography can hide information in a host image and obtain a stego image that is perceptually indistinguishable from the original one. This technique has tremendous potential in scenarios like copyright protection, information retrospection, etc. Some previous studies have proposed to enhance the robustness of the methods against image disturbances to increase their applicability. However, they generally cannot achieve a satisfying balance between the steganography quality and robustness. In this paper, we focus on the issue of QR Code steganography that is robust to real-world printing and photography. Different from common image steganography, QR Code steganography aims to embed a non-natural image into a natural image and the restored QR Code is required to be recognizable, which increases the difficulty of data concealing and revealing. Inspired by the recent developments in transformer-based vision models, we discover that the tokenized representation of images is naturally suitable for steganography. In this paper, we propose a novel QR Code embedding framework, called Printing and Photography Robust Steganography (PPRSteg), which is competent to hide QR Code in a host image with unperceivable changes and can restore it even if the stego image is printed out and photoed. We outline a transition process to reduce the artifacts in stego images brought by QR Codes. We also propose a steganography model based on normalizing flow, which combines the attention mechanism to enhance its performance. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that integrates the advantages of transformer models into normalizing flow. We conduct comprehensive and detailed experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and the result shows that PPRSteg has great potential in robust, secure and high-quality QR Code steganography.
Text-to-Vector Generation with Neural Path Representation
May 16, 2024Vector graphics are widely used in digital art and highly favored by designers due to their scalability and layer-wise properties. However, the process of creating and editing vector graphics requires creativity and design expertise, making it a time-consuming task. Recent advancements in text-to-vector (T2V) generation have aimed to make this process more accessible. However, existing T2V methods directly optimize control points of vector graphics paths, often resulting in intersecting or jagged paths due to the lack of geometry constraints. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel neural path representation by designing a dual-branch Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that learns the path latent space from both sequence and image modalities. By optimizing the combination of neural paths, we can incorporate geometric constraints while preserving expressivity in generated SVGs. Furthermore, we introduce a two-stage path optimization method to improve the visual and topological quality of generated SVGs. In the first stage, a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model guides the initial generation of complex vector graphics through the Variational Score Distillation (VSD) process. In the second stage, we refine the graphics using a layer-wise image vectorization strategy to achieve clearer elements and structure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments and showcase various applications. The project page is https://intchous.github.io/T2V-NPR.
Analogist: Out-of-the-box Visual In-Context Learning with Image Diffusion Model
May 16, 2024Visual In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a promising research area due to its capability to accomplish various tasks with limited example pairs through analogical reasoning. However, training-based visual ICL has limitations in its ability to generalize to unseen tasks and requires the collection of a diverse task dataset. On the other hand, existing methods in the inference-based visual ICL category solely rely on textual prompts, which fail to capture fine-grained contextual information from given examples and can be time-consuming when converting from images to text prompts. To address these challenges, we propose Analogist, a novel inference-based visual ICL approach that exploits both visual and textual prompting techniques using a text-to-image diffusion model pretrained for image inpainting. For visual prompting, we propose a self-attention cloning (SAC) method to guide the fine-grained structural-level analogy between image examples. For textual prompting, we leverage GPT-4V's visual reasoning capability to efficiently generate text prompts and introduce a cross-attention masking (CAM) operation to enhance the accuracy of semantic-level analogy guided by text prompts. Our method is out-of-the-box and does not require fine-tuning or optimization. It is also generic and flexible, enabling a wide range of visual tasks to be performed in an in-context manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing approaches, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Learn2Talk: 3D Talking Face Learns from 2D Talking Face
Apr 19, 2024
Speech-driven facial animation methods usually contain two main classes, 3D and 2D talking face, both of which attract considerable research attention in recent years. However, to the best of our knowledge, the research on 3D talking face does not go deeper as 2D talking face, in the aspect of lip-synchronization (lip-sync) and speech perception. To mind the gap between the two sub-fields, we propose a learning framework named Learn2Talk, which can construct a better 3D talking face network by exploiting two expertise points from the field of 2D talking face. Firstly, inspired by the audio-video sync network, a 3D sync-lip expert model is devised for the pursuit of lip-sync between audio and 3D facial motion. Secondly, a teacher model selected from 2D talking face methods is used to guide the training of the audio-to-3D motions regression network to yield more 3D vertex accuracy. Extensive experiments show the advantages of the proposed framework in terms of lip-sync, vertex accuracy and speech perception, compared with state-of-the-arts. Finally, we show two applications of the proposed framework: audio-visual speech recognition and speech-driven 3D Gaussian Splatting based avatar animation.
AniClipart: Clipart Animation with Text-to-Video Priors
Apr 18, 2024Clipart, a pre-made graphic art form, offers a convenient and efficient way of illustrating visual content. Traditional workflows to convert static clipart images into motion sequences are laborious and time-consuming, involving numerous intricate steps like rigging, key animation and in-betweening. Recent advancements in text-to-video generation hold great potential in resolving this problem. Nevertheless, direct application of text-to-video generation models often struggles to retain the visual identity of clipart images or generate cartoon-style motions, resulting in unsatisfactory animation outcomes. In this paper, we introduce AniClipart, a system that transforms static clipart images into high-quality motion sequences guided by text-to-video priors. To generate cartoon-style and smooth motion, we first define B\'{e}zier curves over keypoints of the clipart image as a form of motion regularization. We then align the motion trajectories of the keypoints with the provided text prompt by optimizing the Video Score Distillation Sampling (VSDS) loss, which encodes adequate knowledge of natural motion within a pretrained text-to-video diffusion model. With a differentiable As-Rigid-As-Possible shape deformation algorithm, our method can be end-to-end optimized while maintaining deformation rigidity. Experimental results show that the proposed AniClipart consistently outperforms existing image-to-video generation models, in terms of text-video alignment, visual identity preservation, and motion consistency. Furthermore, we showcase the versatility of AniClipart by adapting it to generate a broader array of animation formats, such as layered animation, which allows topological changes.
RaFE: Generative Radiance Fields Restoration
Apr 07, 2024NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields) has demonstrated tremendous potential in novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction, but its performance is sensitive to input image quality, which struggles to achieve high-fidelity rendering when provided with low-quality sparse input viewpoints. Previous methods for NeRF restoration are tailored for specific degradation type, ignoring the generality of restoration. To overcome this limitation, we propose a generic radiance fields restoration pipeline, named RaFE, which applies to various types of degradations, such as low resolution, blurriness, noise, compression artifacts, or their combinations. Our approach leverages the success of off-the-shelf 2D restoration methods to recover the multi-view images individually. Instead of reconstructing a blurred NeRF by averaging inconsistencies, we introduce a novel approach using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for NeRF generation to better accommodate the geometric and appearance inconsistencies present in the multi-view images. Specifically, we adopt a two-level tri-plane architecture, where the coarse level remains fixed to represent the low-quality NeRF, and a fine-level residual tri-plane to be added to the coarse level is modeled as a distribution with GAN to capture potential variations in restoration. We validate RaFE on both synthetic and real cases for various restoration tasks, demonstrating superior performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, surpassing other 3D restoration methods specific to single task. Please see our project website https://zkaiwu.github.io/RaFE-Project/.
Direct-a-Video: Customized Video Generation with User-Directed Camera Movement and Object Motion
Feb 05, 2024Recent text-to-video diffusion models have achieved impressive progress. In practice, users often desire the ability to control object motion and camera movement independently for customized video creation. However, current methods lack the focus on separately controlling object motion and camera movement in a decoupled manner, which limits the controllability and flexibility of text-to-video models. In this paper, we introduce Direct-a-Video, a system that allows users to independently specify motions for one or multiple objects and/or camera movements, as if directing a video. We propose a simple yet effective strategy for the decoupled control of object motion and camera movement. Object motion is controlled through spatial cross-attention modulation using the model's inherent priors, requiring no additional optimization. For camera movement, we introduce new temporal cross-attention layers to interpret quantitative camera movement parameters. We further employ an augmentation-based approach to train these layers in a self-supervised manner on a small-scale dataset, eliminating the need for explicit motion annotation. Both components operate independently, allowing individual or combined control, and can generalize to open-domain scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our method. Project page: https://direct-a-video.github.io/.
Advances in 3D Generation: A Survey
Jan 31, 2024Generating 3D models lies at the core of computer graphics and has been the focus of decades of research. With the emergence of advanced neural representations and generative models, the field of 3D content generation is developing rapidly, enabling the creation of increasingly high-quality and diverse 3D models. The rapid growth of this field makes it difficult to stay abreast of all recent developments. In this survey, we aim to introduce the fundamental methodologies of 3D generation methods and establish a structured roadmap, encompassing 3D representation, generation methods, datasets, and corresponding applications. Specifically, we introduce the 3D representations that serve as the backbone for 3D generation. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive overview of the rapidly growing literature on generation methods, categorized by the type of algorithmic paradigms, including feedforward generation, optimization-based generation, procedural generation, and generative novel view synthesis. Lastly, we discuss available datasets, applications, and open challenges. We hope this survey will help readers explore this exciting topic and foster further advancements in the field of 3D content generation.
StyleRetoucher: Generalized Portrait Image Retouching with GAN Priors
Dec 22, 2023Creating fine-retouched portrait images is tedious and time-consuming even for professional artists. There exist automatic retouching methods, but they either suffer from over-smoothing artifacts or lack generalization ability. To address such issues, we present StyleRetoucher, a novel automatic portrait image retouching framework, leveraging StyleGAN's generation and generalization ability to improve an input portrait image's skin condition while preserving its facial details. Harnessing the priors of pretrained StyleGAN, our method shows superior robustness: a). performing stably with fewer training samples and b). generalizing well on the out-domain data. Moreover, by blending the spatial features of the input image and intermediate features of the StyleGAN layers, our method preserves the input characteristics to the largest extent. We further propose a novel blemish-aware feature selection mechanism to effectively identify and remove the skin blemishes, improving the image skin condition. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations validate the great generalization capability of our method. Further experiments show StyleRetoucher's superior performance to the alternative solutions in the image retouching task. We also conduct a user perceptive study to confirm the superior retouching performance of our method over the existing state-of-the-art alternatives.