Deep Image-based Illumination Harmonization

TL;DR

This paper introduces DIH-GAN, a deep learning framework that achieves seamless illumination harmonization for inserting foreground objects into background scenes, using a new dataset and a multi-scale attention mechanism.

Contribution

It proposes a novel GAN-based approach with illumination exchange and aggregation, and constructs a large-scale dataset for training and evaluation.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in illumination harmonization

Generates realistic shadows cast by foreground objects

Achieves harmonious appearance and illumination in diverse scenes

Abstract

Integrating a foreground object into a background scene with illumination harmonization is an important but challenging task in computer vision and augmented reality community. Existing methods mainly focus on foreground and background appearance consistency or the foreground object shadow generation, which rarely consider global appearance and illumination harmonization. In this paper, we formulate seamless illumination harmonization as an illumination exchange and aggregation problem. Specifically, we firstly apply a physically-based rendering method to construct a large-scale, high-quality dataset (named IH) for our task, which contains various types of foreground objects and background scenes with different lighting conditions. Then, we propose a deep image-based illumination harmonization GAN framework named DIH-GAN, which makes full use of a multi-scale attention mechanism and illumination exchange strategy to directly infer mapping relationship between the inserted foreground object and the corresponding background scene. Meanwhile, we also use adversarial learning strategy to further refine the illumination harmonization result. Our method can not only achieve harmonious appearance and illumination for the foreground object but also can generate compelling shadow cast by the foreground object. Comprehensive experiments on both our IH dataset and real-world images show that our proposed DIH-GAN provides a practical and effective solution for image-based object illumination harmonization editing, and validate the superiority of our method against state-of-the-art methods. Our IH dataset is available at https://github.com/zhongyunbao/Dataset.