EffectErase: Joint Video Object Removal and Insertion for High-Quality Effect Erasing

TL;DR

EffectErase is a novel method for high-quality video object removal and effect erasing, leveraging a new large-scale dataset VOR and reciprocal learning to handle complex effects and backgrounds.

Contribution

The paper introduces VOR, a comprehensive dataset for object effect removal, and EffectErase, a new effect-aware video object removal approach with reciprocal learning and task guidance.

Findings

EffectErase outperforms existing methods in effect erasing quality.

VOR dataset enables robust training and evaluation across diverse scenarios.

The reciprocal learning scheme improves effect localization and background synthesis.

Abstract

Video object removal aims to eliminate dynamic target objects and their visual effects, such as deformation, shadows, and reflections, while restoring seamless backgrounds. Recent diffusion-based video inpainting and object removal methods can remove the objects but often struggle to erase these effects and to synthesize coherent backgrounds. Beyond method limitations, progress is further hampered by the lack of a comprehensive dataset that systematically captures common object effects across varied environments for training and evaluation. To address this, we introduce VOR (Video Object Removal), a large-scale dataset that provides diverse paired videos, each consisting of one video where the target object is present with its effects and a counterpart where the object and effects are absent, with corresponding object masks. VOR contains 60K high-quality video pairs from captured and synthetic sources, covers five effects types, and spans a wide range of object categories as well as complex, dynamic multi-object scenes. Building on VOR, we propose EffectErase, an effect-aware video object removal method that treats video object insertion as the inverse auxiliary task within a reciprocal learning scheme. The model includes task-aware region guidance that focuses learning on affected areas and enables flexible task switching. Then, an insertion-removal consistency objective that encourages complementary behaviors and shared localization of effect regions and structural cues. Trained on VOR, EffectErase achieves superior performance in extensive experiments, delivering high-quality video object effect erasing across diverse scenarios.