Scene Depth Estimation from Traditional Oriental Landscape Paintings

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel two-step framework combining image translation and matching to estimate scene depth from traditional oriental landscape paintings, aiding visually impaired appreciation.

Contribution

It presents the first method to estimate depth in oriental landscape paintings using a combination of CycleGAN, CLIP, and depth models, bridging art and 3D understanding.

Findings

Effective depth prediction for oriental paintings

First approach to depth estimation in this art style

Potential aid for visually impaired viewers

Abstract

Scene depth estimation from paintings can streamline the process of 3D sculpture creation so that visually impaired people appreciate the paintings with tactile sense. However, measuring depth of oriental landscape painting images is extremely challenging due to its unique method of depicting depth and poor preservation. To address the problem of scene depth estimation from oriental landscape painting images, we propose a novel framework that consists of two-step Image-to-Image translation method with CLIP-based image matching at the front end to predict the real scene image that best matches with the given oriental landscape painting image. Then, we employ a pre-trained SOTA depth estimation model for the generated real scene image. In the first step, CycleGAN converts an oriental landscape painting image into a pseudo-real scene image. We utilize CLIP to semantically match landscape photo images with an oriental landscape painting image for training CycleGAN in an unsupervised manner. Then, the pseudo-real scene image and oriental landscape painting image are fed into DiffuseIT to predict a final real scene image in the second step. Finally, we measure depth of the generated real scene image using a pre-trained depth estimation model such as MiDaS. Experimental results show that our approach performs well enough to predict real scene images corresponding to oriental landscape painting images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to measure the depth of oriental landscape painting images. Our research potentially assists visually impaired people in experiencing paintings in diverse ways. We will release our code and resulting dataset.