# DynamiCrafter: Animating Open-domain Images with Video Diffusion Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.12190 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12190/

## Key facts

- Cited by 471 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 79 of its 105 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 79)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (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)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [ModelScope Text-to-Video Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06571/) (2023)
- [Structure and Content-Guided Video Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03011/) (2023)
- [OpenFlamingo: An Open-Source Framework for Training Large Autoregressive Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01390/) (2023)
- [Phenaki: Variable Length Video Generation From Open Domain Textual Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02399/) (2022)
- [MagicVideo: Efficient Video Generation With Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11018/) (2022)
- [VideoComposer: Compositional Video Synthesis with Motion Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02018/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 471)

- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [VideoCrafter2: Overcoming Data Limitations for High-Quality Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09047/) (2024)
- [ViewCrafter: Taming Video Diffusion Models for High-fidelity Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02048/) (2024)
- [I2VGen-XL: High-Quality Image-to-Video Synthesis via Cascaded Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04145/) (2023)
- [Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17398/) (2024)
- [VBench-2.0: Advancing Video Generation Benchmark Suite for Intrinsic Faithfulness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21755/) (2025)
- [Open-Sora Plan: Open-Source Large Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00131/) (2024)
- [StreamingT2V: Consistent, Dynamic, and Extendable Long Video Generation from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14773/) (2024)
- [Show-o2: Improved Native Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15564/) (2025)
- [Motion-I2V: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Generation with Explicit Motion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15977/) (2024)
- [DepthCrafter: Generating Consistent Long Depth Sequences for Open-world Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02095/) (2024)
- [Diffusion as Shader: 3D-aware Video Diffusion for Versatile Video Generation Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03847/) (2025)
- [Causal Forcing: Autoregressive Diffusion Distillation Done Right for High-Quality Real-Time Interactive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02214/) (2026)
- [Motion Prompting: Controlling Video Generation with Motion Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02700/) (2024)
- [SparseCtrl: Adding Sparse Controls to Text-to-Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16933/) (2023)
- [PhysGen: Rigid-Body Physics-Grounded Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18964/) (2024)
- [History-Guided Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06764/) (2025)
- [Context as Memory: Scene-Consistent Interactive Long Video Generation with Memory Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03141/) (2025)
- [ControlNeXt: Powerful and Efficient Control for Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06070/) (2024)
- [Identity-Preserving Text-to-Video Generation by Frequency Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17440/) (2024)
- [WorldScore: A Unified Evaluation Benchmark for World Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00983/) (2025)
- [AnyV2V: A Tuning-Free Framework For Any Video-to-Video Editing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14468/) (2024)
- [MiraData: A Large-Scale Video Dataset with Long Durations and Structured Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06358/) (2024)
- [ReconX: Reconstruct Any Scene from Sparse Views with Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16767/) (2024)
- [Lumina-T2X: Transforming Text into Any Modality, Resolution, and Duration via Flow-based Large Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05945/) (2024)
- [ConsistI2V: Enhancing Visual Consistency for Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04324/) (2024)
- [GameFactory: Creating New Games with Generative Interactive Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08325/) (2025)
- [GameGen-X: Interactive Open-world Game Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00769/) (2024)
- [TrajectoryCrafter: Redirecting Camera Trajectory for Monocular Videos via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05638/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Animating a still image offers an engaging visual experience. Traditional image animation techniques mainly focus on animating natural scenes with stochastic dynamics (e.g. clouds and fluid) or domain-specific motions (e.g. human hair or body motions), and thus limits their applicability to more general visual content. To overcome this limitation, we explore the synthesis of dynamic content for open-domain images, converting them into animated videos. The key idea is to utilize the motion prior of text-to-video diffusion models by incorporating the image into the generative process as guidance. Given an image, we first project it into a text-aligned rich context representation space using a query transformer, which facilitates the video model to digest the image content in a compatible fashion. However, some visual details still struggle to be preserved in the resultant videos. To supplement with more precise image information, we further feed the full image to the diffusion model by concatenating it with the initial noises. Experimental results show that our proposed method can produce visually convincing and more logical & natural motions, as well as higher conformity to the input image. Comparative evaluation demonstrates the notable superiority of our approach over existing competitors.