TRACE: Object Motion Editing in Videos with First-Frame Trajectory Guidance

TL;DR

This paper introduces TRACE, a user-friendly video editing framework that allows for precise object motion editing by designing trajectories in a single frame, ensuring realistic and coherent results even with camera motion.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel two-stage pipeline for object motion editing that simplifies user control and improves realism over existing methods.

Findings

Produces more coherent and realistic motion edits

Handles camera motion effectively during editing

Outperforms recent image-to-video and video-to-video methods

Abstract

We study object motion path editing in videos, where the goal is to alter a target object's trajectory while preserving the original scene content. Unlike prior video editing methods that primarily manipulate appearance or rely on point-track-based trajectory control, which is often challenging for users to provide during inference, especially in videos with camera motion, we offer a practical, easy-to-use approach to controllable object-centric motion editing. We present Trace, a framework that enables users to design the desired trajectory in a single anchor frame and then synthesizes a temporally consistent edited video. Our approach addresses this task with a two-stage pipeline: a cross-view motion transformation module that maps first-frame path design to frame-aligned box trajectories under camera motion, and a motion-conditioned video re-synthesis module that follows these trajectories to regenerate the object while preserving the remaining content of the input video. Experiments on diverse real-world videos show that our method produces more coherent, realistic, and controllable motion edits than recent image-to-video and video-to-video methods.