ObjectDrop: Bootstrapping Counterfactuals for Photorealistic Object Removal and Insertion

Abstract

[width=0.7]figures/frontp age.pdf Figure 1: Object removal and insertion. Our method models the effects of an object on the scene including occlusions, reflections, and shadows, enabling photorealistic object removal and insertion. It significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Diffusion models have revolutionized image editing but often generate images that violate physical laws, particularly the effects of objects on the scene, e.g., occlusions, shadows, and reflections. By analyzing the limitations of self-supervised approaches, we propose a practical solution centered on a counterfactual dataset. Our method involves capturing a scene before and after removing a single object, while minimizing other changes. By fine-tuning a diffusion model on this dataset, we are able to not only remove objects but also their effects on the scene. However, we find that applying this approach for photorealistic object insertion requires an impractically large dataset. To tackle this challenge, we propose bootstrap supervision; leveraging our object removal model trained on a small counterfactual dataset, we synthetically expand this dataset considerably. Our approach significantly outperforms prior methods in photorealistic object removal and insertion, particularly in modeling the effects of objects on the scene.