FashionR2R: Texture-preserving Rendered-to-Real Image Translation with Diffusion Models

Modeling and producing lifelike clothed human images has attracted researchers' attention from different areas for decades, with the complexity from highly articulated and structured content. Rendering algorithms decompose and simulate the imaging process of a camera, while are limited by the accuracy of modeled variables and the efficiency of computation. Generative models can produce impressively vivid human images, however still lacking in controllability and editability. This paper studies photorealism enhancement of rendered images, leveraging generative power from diffusion models on the controlled basis of rendering. We introduce a novel framework to translate rendered images into their realistic counterparts, which consists of two stages: Domain Knowledge Injection (DKI) and Realistic Image Generation (RIG). In DKI, we adopt positive (real) domain finetuning and negative (rendered) domain embedding to inject knowledge into a pretrained Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model. In RIG, we generate the realistic image corresponding to the input rendered image, with a Texture-preserving Attention Control (TAC) to preserve fine-grained clothing textures, exploiting the decoupled features encoded in the UNet structure. Additionally, we introduce SynFashion dataset, featuring high-quality digital clothing images with diverse textures. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our method in rendered-to-real image translation.

Paper

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Peer review

Reviewer L3jv6/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-09

Summary

This paper proposes a diffusion-based method for enhancing the realism of fashion images generated through computer graphics pipelines. To this end, the paper introduces a Texture Preserving Attention Control for improving the appearance of the textures in garments in the generated images, and a domain-knowledge injection for improving the realism of the images. The paper presents SynFashion, a synthetic dataset for research on this topic, and provides an open-source implementation. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are provided.

Strengths

- The paper tackles an important problem, which is that of enhancing the realism of images generated with computer graphics applications. - This paper presents a new dataset for research on this topic. The dataset looks very interesting, comprising a diverse set of textures and garments. I believe this dataset is a salient contribution of this work. - The proposed methods are sound, well motivated in the context of the application, and well presented. - Supplementary material provides additional insights on the results of these methods. - Code is provided which should enhance reproducibility. - Evaluation provides qualitative and quantitative results against some baselines, showing improved realism and preservation of the texture in the garments.

Weaknesses

- Some of the contributions of this work are very tied to a specific application, which is that of generating images of textured garments. While the methods are sound, I believe this somewhat narrow application strongly limits the scope of this work. It is unclear how the proposed contributions, particularly the Texture-Preserving Attention Control could be leveraged for other applications. - The analysis of the related work is somewhat lacking. Please see "Questions" for a few suggestions. - The paper is sometimes lacking in clarity, being overly convoluted in its writing. - The proposed method is very computationally costly. While this is acknowledged by the authors, I think it is a significant limitation of this work. In this regard, the long computational times of this method make it unsuitable for many applications, including interactive virtual try-on. Further, I believe that a more powerful computer graphics engine (eg Unreal Engine 5) could achieve better and faster than the baselines utilized by this paper. In this regard, a state-of-the-art graphics pipeline could make the method in this paper less relevant, as they are slower and less controllable than traditional graphics software. - I believe the title "Make Fashion Real" is confusing. I understand what it tries to mean, but it is not clear and makes little sense.

Questions

- Are there any applications for which the proposed modules could be used, that are not specific to garment generation? Missing references: - SMPLitex: A Generative Model and Dataset for 3D Human Texture Estimation from Single Image (BMVC23) - Single-image Full-body Human Relighting (EGSR21) - Learning to relight portrait images via a virtual light stage and synthetic-to-real adaptation (TOG22) - Paint-it: Text-to-texture synthesis via deep convolutional texture map optimization and physically-based rendering (CVPR24)

Rating

6

Confidence

3

Soundness

2

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

The paper is up-front about its limitations. I appreciate this part of the paper.

Reviewer cE2m3/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-10

Summary

This paper proposes a method to translate synthetic renderings of fashion shots into photorealistic images. It is based on Stable Diffusion; SD is first fine-tuned on the target domain; then a negative guidance token for the rendered domain is learnt; then the image is translated by DDIM-inversion in original SD followed by reconstruction with the fine-tuned SD under the learnt negative guidance (i.e. encoraging the image to look 'less synthetic'). Results are presented on two datasets, FaceSynthetics and SynFashion; the latter is proposed in the present work. Quantitative and qualitative results show some improvement over four baselines.

Strengths

- The proposed pipeline is novel. The individual components are fairly standard (DDIM inversion; fine-tuning; dreambooth-style token optimisation), but combined in a sensible (and clearly motivated) way to solve the relevant task. - Curated qualitative results presented in the main paper are significantly than four baselines (CUT, SANTA, VCT, UNSB), with good adherence to textural details in garments but significantly more realism than the source renderings - Quantitative metrics on two synthetic datasets (FaceSynthetics and the proposed SynFashion) are better than the four baselines. In particular SSIM is higher (meaning details from the rendered images are preserved) while KID is lower (meaning the distribution of generated images is more realistic) - The paper is generally well-written, well-structured, and clear

Weaknesses

- The paper feels rather insubstantial in terms of scientific contribution. It is not very surprising that the presented techniques can be combined into an effective pipeline, and there are not many insights for the reader. While it appears to be a sound piece of engineering, interest for the NeurIPS community is probably not so great. - Compounding the above point, the ablation study combines together under 'DKI' the two separate ideas of fine-tuning on the target domain, and learning a guidance signal 'away' from the source domain; this makes it unclear what their relative benefits are. Moreover, there are no quantitative ablation results, only two visual examples - Only SSIM and KID are given as metrics – why no other reconstruction metric (e.g. LPIPS, which is better correlated with human perception), and why not FID (which is still much more widely employed than KID)? - Measures of spread / statistical significance are not present, despite authors answering 'yes' to the relevant checklist question. The lack of variance measures in the quantitative results make it impossible to draw comparisons from these – particularly for SSIM where the difference between proposed method and best baseline is exceedingly small. For KID, 7500 images is on the low side for robustness of the metric. - The method appears somewhat 'conservative', in the sense that it favors preserving appearance over enforcing realism. See for example the outputs in fig. 8, where the model makes only minimal changes to the renderings, failing to reach photorealism for most of the rows

Questions

- The description of TAC (L211-226) is somewhat unclear; in particular it should be stated up-front where the two sets of self attention features are coming from. Are the CG-domain features from the DDIM inversion pass on the input image? And the R-domain those in the reverse process, which differ due to the negative guidance? - What are the standard deviations on the quantitative results? - What are the quantitative results from the ablations, including removing source & target DKI separately? - Figure 6 is not in fact an ablation experiment – it doesn't remove any component of the model to demonstrate importance; it merely shows the effect of varying certain hyperparameters. Please adjust the text/caption accordingly - Table 2 in App. A3 would be much easier to read if it were transposed. Also it is wrongly named in the text as "Table A3" - Reference to Table 3 at L279 is also broken

Rating

3

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

1

Limitations

There is adequate discussion of limitations, and a very brief discussion of broader impacts.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

Response to the following discussion

We thank the reviewer for the follow-up. The standard deviations here show the variance over test inputs for a fixed model. For each method, the standard deviations of SSIM/LPIPS are calculated with this formula $\sigma = \sqrt{\sum{(x_i - \mu)^{2}}/{N}}$, where $x_i$ is the value in SSIM/LPIPS for the test input $i$, $N$ is the number of test input samples (7500), and $\mu$ is the corresponding mean of this metric over $N$ test inputs. For KID, we adopt the public API torch-fidelity [1]. We do not conduct calculation over training random seeds due to lack of time and have not noticed obvious instability over training seeds in experiments. Additionally, we want to kindly remind the reviewer that defining and quantifying "realism" is still an open question, which means the metrics do not accurately align with the objective. A better score in a stand-alone metric, SSIM/LPIPS for preservation to rendered inputs, or KID for realism enhancement, does not always lead to advantages in reaching the goal of the task, due to the trade-off between these two goals. Given the roughly aligned metrics, the further statistical analysis might be a bit less informative than in other well-defined problems. Indeed, we have to admit that we could not emphasize or claim statistical significance in this work but only roughly demonstrate the stability and generalization ability, which is probably why the relevant information is missing in many generation/translation works. We want to thank the reviewer for noting this issue and will include discussion in our paper. In the statistical comparisons, our SSIM is indeed very close to UNSB, but we do have a much lower LPIPS (0.1206 VS 0.2287 for FaceSynthetics, 0.0671 VS 0.1299 for SynFashion) and a much lower KID (73.831 VS 76.389 for FaceSynthetics, 54.720 VS 59.496 for SynFashion). As the reviewer suggested, LPIPS is better correlated with human perception than SSIM. The user studies in response to Reviewer SbYx also show significant statistical preference for our results over UNSB. [1] High-fidelity performance metrics for generative models in PyTorch. (Zenodo,2020), github.com/toshas/torch-fidelity, Version: 0.3.0, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4957738

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

Thank you once again for taking the time to review our response. As the discussion stage is coming to an end, we would like to ask if all the issues have been satisfactorily addressed. If there are any remaining concerns, we would be more than happy to discuss them further. If you find that your concerns have been resolved, we would greatly appreciate it if you could consider raising your score. Thanks! If the reviewer is interested in further analysis between our work and UNSB, we believe one main advantage of our method is that, we propose to control certain attributes concerning color and geometric information through self-attention injection with our TAC. This leverages the prior in the diffusion UNet structure and somehow "disentangles" the gaps between rendered image and real image domain to some extent. Note that the gaps between these two domains include not only fine-grained material properties and illuminaion, which are directly related to the "realism" we want to "enhance", but also other variables such as human poses and clothing styles that we want to maintain and preserve. This makes it difficult for general unpaired image-to-image translation methods to handle if there are no specific designs to deal with it, especially for images with higher resolution.

Reviewer SbYx6/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-11

Summary

The paper presents an advancement in the field of rendered-to-real image translation, particularly for fashion images. Its novel approach, focus on texture preservation, and contribution of a new dataset make it a valuable addition to the literature.

Strengths

The Texture-preserving Attention Control (TAC) mechanism effectively maintains fine-grained details in clothing textures, which is crucial for realistic image generation. Introduction of the SynFashion dataset fills a gap in the availability of high-quality rendered fashion images, facilitating further research in this area. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over existing techniques, highlighting its effectiveness in achieving realistic image translation.

Weaknesses

The paper acknowledges that defining and quantifying "realism" remains an open question. More robust metrics or user studies could provide better insights into the perceived realism of the generated images.

Questions

Have you conducted any user studies to assess the perceived realism and quality of the generated images compared to existing methods? Can you discuss the trade-offs involved in maintaining texture details versus achieving overall visual coherence in the generated images?

Rating

6

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

The two-stage process involving Domain Knowledge Injection (DKI) and Realistic Image Generation (RIG) can be computationally intensive. Training and deploying the framework may require substantial computational resources, which could limit its applicability in real-time or resource-constrained environments.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

Thank you

Thank you for taking the time to review our rebuttal. We appreciate your positive re-evaluation and look forward to integrating your insights into the final version of our paper.

Reviewer m8pA5/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-12

Summary

This paper proposed a modified framework for generating realistic fashion photos. The framework enhances existing diffusion models through a knowledge injunction pre-training process and an attention control mechanism during the generation process. Additionally, the author introduced a new dataset including high-resolution textures patterns of digital clothes. This dataset, combined with improvements in texture identification, enables the new framework to perform better compared to other frameworks.

Strengths

1. The author created a high-resolution dataset with more than ten thousand digital cloth texture patterns, which fills a gap in relevant fields. 2. Compared to other frameworks, this framework had a better performance in terms of clothing texture and facial naturalness for given source image. It is an improvement in application of AIGC in everyday life. 3. The framework impressively achieved transforming a clearly unrealistic image containing human faces into a plausible and realistic one.

Weaknesses

1. There is no updating on diffusion structure but relies on pre-training and post-processing. 2. The approach is more engineering application than academic paper. 3. When translating images containing human faces and meaningful backgrounds, the framework seems to lose or even change the background. 4. The structure and grammar of the paper could be further improved for better clarity and readability.

Questions

1. There is a problem regarding the diffusion models that where generated images exhibit significant randomness given the same segment mask. How does the author’s work address this problem? 2. There is a confusion that in the introduction section, for DKI pre-training, the author states they applied a text-to-image diffusion model. However in the rest sections of the paper, it seems the pre-trained model is trained by images. How to understand this difference? 3. Does this framework perform differently on various patterns of texture? For example, what is the outcome when a textual texture, such as a sentence, is given?

Rating

5

Confidence

3

Soundness

2

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

The authors have addressed some limitations of their framework, however it would be more comprehensive if they can add some in-depth discussion on potential negative societal impacts and provide relative solutions.

Reviewer SbYx2024-08-08

Thank you for the thorough response and for implementing the suggestions regarding user studies to evaluate the perceived realism, image quality, and consistency of your method. The approach taken, following StyleDiffusion and comparing against previous works, provides valuable quantitative insights into the strengths of the proposed method. The discussion on the trade-offs between maintaining texture details and achieving overall visual coherence is insightful. The empirical findings regarding the preservation of texture details in shallow layers of the diffusion UNet, coupled with attention injection, are particularly interesting and contribute to understanding how these aspects are effectively balanced in your framework. Regarding computational considerations, the analysis comparing memory consumption and inference times with other state-of-the-art methods on a 512x512 image provides a clear perspective on the efficiency of your approach, especially in comparison to similar diffusion-based techniques like VCT. I appreciate the authors' diligent efforts and valuable contributions to the field. My rating of the paper will remain the same.

Reviewer L3jv2024-08-11

Discussion

Dear authors and reviewers, I have read the reviews and the rebuttal. My concerns regarding computational cost and analysis of related work have been partly addressed. However, some reviewers are unconvinced about the contribution in the paper. I am leaning positive about this submission provided the changes promised are included in the final version of the paper. However, I am curious about the thoughts of the other reviewers, particularly those that were less positive. Best,

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

Thank you for taking time to read the response and being positive about our submission. The reviewers updated their comments and we engaged in discussion. If there are any further questions or additional suggestions, please feel free to share them.

Reviewer m8pA2024-08-12

Thanks for the careful rebuttal, author's feedback have addressed my concern well. I think the importance of contribution has been fully explained, and the author has also acknowledged the flaws and problems of the method and task. So I am willing to increase the rating to 5

Area Chair 5UWp2024-08-12

Dear R-m8pA, Could you take a look at the authors' responses, and share your thoughts? Do you have further questions for the authors? Thanks, Your AC

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

Thank you

Thank you for updating your score. We look forward to incorporating your thoughtful feedback into the final version of the paper.

Area Chair 5UWp2024-08-12

Dear R-cE2m, Could you check the authors' responses? Do you have further questions for the authors? Thanks, Your AC

Area Chair 5UWp2024-08-12

Dear R-L3jv, Could you check the authors' responses, and share your thoughts? Thank you! Your AC

Reviewer cE2m2024-08-12

Response to rebuttal

I thank the authors for the detailed rebuttal. The additional ablation results certainly help to clarify the benefit of each component. How are the standard deviations here calculated? Are they variance over training random seeds, or over test inputs for a fixed model, or something else? It would seem that the improvement versus UNSB is not statistically significant -- can you comment further on this?

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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