View-Aware Image Object Compositing and Synthesis from Multiple Sources

Image compositing is widely used to combine visual elements from separate source images into a single image. Although recent image compositing techniques are capable of achieving smooth blending of the visual elements from different sources, most of them implicitly assume the source images are taken in the same viewpoint. In this paper, we present an approach to compositing novel image objects from multiple source images which have different viewpoints. Our key idea is to construct 3D proxies for meaningful components of the source image objects, and use these 3D component proxies to warp and seamlessly merge components together in the same viewpoint. To realize this idea, we introduce a coordinate-frame based single-view camera calibration algorithm to handle general types of image objects, a structure-aware cuboid optimization algorithm to get the cuboid proxies for image object components with correct structure relationship, and finally a 3D-proxy transformation guided image warping algorithm to stitch object components. We further describe a novel application based on this compositing approach to automatically synthesize a large number of image objects from a set of exemplars. Experimental results show that our compositing approach can be applied to a variety of image objects, such as chairs, cups, lamps, and robots, and the synthesis application can create novel image objects with significant shape and style variations from a small set of exemplars.