Chaoyue Wang

Youjian Zhang, Chaoyue Wang, Dacheng Tao

Video frame interpolation, which aims to synthesize non-exist intermediate frames in a video sequence, is an important research topic in computer vision. Existing video frame interpolation methods have achieved remarkable results under specific assumptions, such as instant or known exposure time. However, in complicated real-world situations, the temporal priors of videos, i.e. frames per second (FPS) and frame exposure time, may vary from different camera sensors. When test videos are taken under different exposure settings from training ones, the interpolated frames will suffer significant misalignment problems. In this work, we solve the video frame interpolation problem in a general situation, where input frames can be acquired under uncertain exposure (and interval) time. Unlike previous methods that can only be applied to a specific temporal prior, we derive a general curvilinear motion trajectory formula from four consecutive sharp frames or two consecutive blurry frames without temporal priors. Moreover, utilizing constraints within adjacent motion trajectories, we devise a novel optical flow refinement strategy for better interpolation results. Finally, experiments demonstrate that one well-trained model is enough for synthesizing high-quality slow-motion videos under complicated real-world situations. Codes are available on https://github.com/yjzhang96/UTI-VFI.

Jianbin Zheng, Minghui Hu, Zhongyi Fan et al.

Latent Consistency Model (LCM) extends the Consistency Model to the latent space and leverages the guided consistency distillation technique to achieve impressive performance in accelerating text-to-image synthesis. However, we observed that LCM struggles to generate images with both clarity and detailed intricacy. Consequently, we introduce Trajectory Consistency Distillation (TCD), which encompasses trajectory consistency function and strategic stochastic sampling. The trajectory consistency function diminishes the parameterisation and distillation errors by broadening the scope of the self-consistency boundary condition with trajectory mapping and endowing the TCD with the ability to accurately trace the entire trajectory of the Probability Flow ODE in semi-linear form with an Exponential Integrator. Additionally, strategic stochastic sampling provides explicit control of stochastic and circumvents the accumulated errors inherent in multi-step consistency sampling. Experiments demonstrate that TCD not only significantly enhances image quality at low NFEs but also yields more detailed results compared to the teacher model at high NFEs.

Huiang He, Minghui Hu, Chuanxia Zheng et al.

Recent advances in style and appearance transfer are impressive, but most methods isolate global style and local appearance transfer, neglecting semantic correspondence. Additionally, image and video tasks are typically handled in isolation, with little focus on integrating them for video transfer. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel task, Semantic Style Transfer, which involves transferring style and appearance features from a reference image to a target visual content based on semantic correspondence. We subsequently propose a training-free method, Semantix an energy-guided sampler designed for Semantic Style Transfer that simultaneously guides both style and appearance transfer based on semantic understanding capacity of pre-trained diffusion models. Additionally, as a sampler, Semantix be seamlessly applied to both image and video models, enabling semantic style transfer to be generic across various visual media. Specifically, once inverting both reference and context images or videos to noise space by SDEs, Semantix utilizes a meticulously crafted energy function to guide the sampling process, including three key components: Style Feature Guidance, Spatial Feature Guidance and Semantic Distance as a regularisation term. Experimental results demonstrate that Semantix not only effectively accomplishes the task of semantic style transfer across images and videos, but also surpasses existing state-of-the-art solutions in both fields. The project website is available at https://huiang-he.github.io/semantix/