Understanding, reasoning, and manipulating semantic concepts of images have been a fundamental research problem for decades. Previous work mainly focused on direct manipulation of natural image manifold through color strokes, key-points, textures, and holes-to-fill. In this work, we present a novel hierarchical framework for semantic image manipulation. Key to our hierarchical framework is that we employ structured semantic layout as our intermediate representations for manipulation. Initialized with coarse-level bounding boxes, our layout generator first creates pixel-wise semantic layout capturing the object shape, object-object interactions, and object-scene relations. Then our image generator fills in the pixel-level textures guided by the semantic layout. Such framework allows a user to manipulate images at object-level by adding, removing, and moving one bounding box at a time. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the advantages of the hierarchical manipulation framework over existing image generation and context hole-filing models, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Benefits of the hierarchical framework are further demonstrated in applications such as semantic object manipulation, interactive image editing, and data-driven image manipulation.

Extensive experiments show that our method generates engaging manipulation results conforming to the transformations entailed in demonstrations.

This process enables the value (feature maps) to be rearranged (through a weighted sum) to align with the form of the query, thereby reflecting their strong correspondence. The input noise is removed because its stochasticity slows down the training. Given the need for balancing between high correspondence and image quality, we empirically set the weights of our loss terms. To demonstrate the influence of the additional losses introduced in our method, we provide both quantitative and qualitative ablations in Figure S2 and S3, respectively. Nonetheless, caution is warranted when overly increasing the number of clusters.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

However, it remains a critical challenge to enable unpaired I2I translation with pre-trained DMs while maintaining satisfying consistency.