# Painterly Image Harmonization using Diffusion Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.02228 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02228/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 47 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Pseudo Numerical Methods for Diffusion Models on Manifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09778/) (2022)
- [DeCAF: A Deep Convolutional Activation Feature for Generic Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.1531/) (2013)
- [Universal Style Transfer via Feature Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08086/) (2017)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer with Style-Attentional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02342/) (2018)
- [Precomputed Real-Time Texture Synthesis with Markovian Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04382/) (2016)
- [StyTr2: Image Style Transfer with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14576/) (2021)
- [AdaAttN: Revisit Attention Mechanism in Arbitrary Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03647/) (2021)
- [Style Transfer by Relaxed Optimal Transport and Self-Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12785/) (2019)
- [Demystifying Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01036/) (2017)
- [Diffusion-based Image Translation using Disentangled Style and Content Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15264/) (2022)
- [DoveNet: Deep Image Harmonization via Domain Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13239/) (2019)
- [Exact Feature Distribution Matching for Arbitrary Style Transfer and Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07740/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Relightful Harmonization: Lighting-aware Portrait Background Replacement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06886/) (2023)
- [Does FLUX Already Know How to Perform Physically Plausible Image Composition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21278/) (2025)
- [Diffusion-Based Visual Art Creation: A Survey and New Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12128/) (2024)
- [Anything in Any Scene: Photorealistic Video Object Insertion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17509/) (2024)
- [FreePIH: Training-Free Painterly Image Harmonization with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14926/) (2023)
- [X-Dreamer: Creating High-quality 3D Content by Bridging the Domain Gap Between Text-to-2D and Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00085/) (2023)
- [HarmonyIQA: Pioneering Benchmark and Model for Image Harmonization Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01116/) (2025)
- [DreamInsert: Zero-Shot Image-to-Video Object Insertion from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10342/) (2025)
- [MTADiffusion: Mask Text Alignment Diffusion Model for Object Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23482/) (2025)
- [Painterly Image Harmonization via Adversarial Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08646/) (2023)
- [Harmonizing Attention: Training-free Texture-aware Geometry Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10846/) (2024)
- [Chameleon: Style-Content Disentangled Framework for Cross-Domain Object Compositing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01079/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Painterly image harmonization aims to insert photographic objects into paintings and obtain artistically coherent composite images. Previous methods for this task mainly rely on inference optimization or generative adversarial network, but they are either very time-consuming or struggling at fine control of the foreground objects (e.g., texture and content details). To address these issues, we propose a novel Painterly Harmonization stable Diffusion model (PHDiffusion), which includes a lightweight adaptive encoder and a Dual Encoder Fusion (DEF) module. Specifically, the adaptive encoder and the DEF module first stylize foreground features within each encoder. Then, the stylized foreground features from both encoders are combined to guide the harmonization process. During training, besides the noise loss in diffusion model, we additionally employ content loss and two style losses, i.e., AdaIN style loss and contrastive style loss, aiming to balance the trade-off between style migration and content preservation. Compared with the state-of-the-art models from related fields, our PHDiffusion can stylize the foreground more sufficiently and simultaneously retain finer content. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/bcmi/PHDiffusion-Painterly-Image-Harmonization.