Making Images Real Again: A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Image Composition
It addresses the problem of creating realistic composite images for image editing applications, but it is incremental as it surveys existing work without proposing new methods.
This paper provides a comprehensive survey on deep image composition, summarizing methods, datasets, and evaluation metrics for sub-tasks like object placement and image harmonization, and introduces a toolbox and online workbench to facilitate research.
As a common image editing operation, image composition (object insertion) aims to combine the foreground from one image and another background image, to produce a composite image. However, there are many issues that could make the composite images unrealistic. These issues can be summarized as the inconsistency between foreground and background, which includes appearance inconsistency (e.g., incompatible illumination), geometry inconsistency (e.g., unreasonable size), and semantic inconsistency (e.g., mismatched semantic context). The image composition task could be decomposed into multiple sub-tasks, in which each sub-task targets one or more issues. Specifically, object placement aims to find reasonable scale, location, and shape for the foreground. Image blending aims to address the unnatural boundary between foreground and background. Image harmonization aims to adjust the illumination statistics of foreground. Shadow (resp., reflection) generation aims to generate plausible shadow (resp., reflection) for the foreground. These sub-tasks can be executed sequentially or in parallel to acquire realistic composite images. To the best of our knowledge, there is no previous survey on image composition. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey over the sub-tasks and combined task of image composition. For each one, we summarize the existing methods, available datasets, and common evaluation metrics. Datasets and codes for image composition are summarized at https://github.com/bcmi/Awesome-Object-Insertion. We have also contributed the first image composition toolbox: libcom https://github.com/bcmi/libcom, which assembles 10+ image-composition-related functions. The ultimate goal of this toolbox is to solve all image composition problems with simple `import libcom'. Based on libcom toolbox, we also develop an online image composition workbench https://libcom.ustcnewly.com.