mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Zero-Shot Image Harmonization with Generative Model Prior

arXiv 2307.08182 ↗First posted 17 Jul 2023cs.CVcited by 8

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a zero-shot approach to image harmonization, aiming to overcome the reliance on large amounts of synthetic composite images in existing methods. These methods, while showing promising results, involve significant training expenses and often struggle with generalization to unseen images. To this end, we introduce a fully modularized framework inspired by human behavior. Leveraging the reasoning capabilities of recent foundation models in language and vision, our approach comprises three main stages. Initially, we employ a pretrained vision-language model (VLM) to generate descriptions for the composite image. Subsequently, these descriptions guide the foreground harmonization direction of a text-to-image generative model (T2I). We refine text embeddings for enhanced representation of imaging conditions and employ self-attention and edge maps for structure preservation. Following each harmonization iteration, an evaluator determines whether to conclude or modify the harmonization direction. The resulting framework, mirroring human behavior, achieves harmonious results without the need for extensive training. We present compelling visual results across diverse scenes and objects, along with a user study validating the effectiveness of our approach.

Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 55 of its 88 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2023.

Builds on

55 of 88 references.

References · 55

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
  3. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
  4. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
  5. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
  6. 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,498
  7. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,655
  8. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,185
  9. 2015Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamicscited by 7,005
  10. 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latentscited by 6,539
  11. 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,322
  12. 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,717
38 more
  1. 2021Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generationcited by 4,276
  2. 2022LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text modelscited by 4,131
  3. 2021On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Modelscited by 3,961
  4. 2021Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 3,736
  5. 2022DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generationcited by 3,286
  6. 2022Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Controlcited by 2,409
  7. 2022An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversioncited by 2,231
  8. 2022DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Stepscited by 1,961
  9. 2021Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,296
  10. 2022Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generationcited by 1,287
  11. 2022Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 1,168
  12. 2016Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Datasetcited by 1,063
  13. 2021Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Imagescited by 924
  14. 2021CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformerscited by 691
  15. 2022DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidancecited by 643
  16. 2022Zero-Shot Image Restoration Using Denoising Diffusion Null-Space Modelcited by 574
  17. 2022Paint by Example: Exemplar-based Image Editing with Diffusion Modelscited by 489
  18. 2022Training-Free Structured Diffusion Guidance for Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesiscited by 386
  19. 2022DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detectioncited by 354
  20. 2021SegDiff: Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 279
  21. 2022SmartBrush: Text and Shape Guided Object Inpainting with Diffusion Modelcited by 276
  22. 2022Splicing ViT Features for Semantic Appearance Transfercited by 209
  23. 2021Pixel Difference Networks for Efficient Edge Detectioncited by 167
  24. 2020Learning Image-adaptive 3D Lookup Tables for High Performance Photo Enhancement in Real-timecited by 163
  25. 2022Diffusion-based Image Translation using Disentangled Style and Content Representationcited by 148
  26. 2019DoveNet: Deep Image Harmonization via Domain Verificationcited by 134
  27. 2017Deep Image Harmonizationcited by 120
  28. 2022Uncovering the Disentanglement Capability in Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 116
  29. 2023Diffusion Models for Imperceptible and Transferable Adversarial Attackcited by 93
  30. 2022Harmonizer: Learning to Perform White-Box Image and Video Harmonizationcited by 61
  31. 2021SSH: A Self-Supervised Framework for Image Harmonizationcited by 60
  32. 2021High-Resolution Image Harmonization via Collaborative Dual Transformationscited by 55
  33. 2020Foreground-aware Semantic Representations for Image Harmonizationcited by 53
  34. 2022DCCF: Deep Comprehensible Color Filter Learning Framework for High-Resolution Image Harmonizationcited by 46
  35. 2023Semi-supervised Parametric Real-world Image Harmonizationcited by 26
  36. 2021Spatial-Separated Curve Rendering Network for Efficient and High-Resolution Image Harmonizationcited by 25
  37. 2022SCS-Co: Self-Consistent Style Contrastive Learning for Image Harmonizationcited by 24
  38. 2022The Stable Artist: Steering Semantics in Diffusion Latent Spacecited by 23

50 most cited of 55 All 55 (JSON)

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 1; 2025: 2; 2026: 4.

8 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024Learning by Correction: Efficient Tuning Task for Zero-Shot Generative Vision-Language Reasoning
  2. 2025Synthetic Captions for Open-Vocabulary Zero-Shot Segmentation
  3. 2023Paste, Inpaint and Harmonize via Denoising: Subject-Driven Image Editing with Pre-Trained Diffusion Model
  4. 2025Enhancing Vision-Language Compositional Understanding with Multimodal Synthetic Data
  5. 2025Symmetrical Visual Contrastive Optimization: Aligning Vision-Language Models with Minimal Contrastive Images
  6. 2022Write and Paint: Generative Vision-Language Models are Unified Modal Learners
  7. 2023Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Classifiers
  8. 2024Instruct-Imagen: Image Generation with Multi-modal Instruction