# Synthesizing Environment-Specific People in Photographs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14579 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14579/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [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)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [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)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [ILVR: Conditioning Method for Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02938/) (2021)
- [Advances in Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05849/) (2021)
- [UNet 3+: A Full-Scale Connected UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08790/) (2020)
- [Everybody Dance Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07371/) (2018)
- [State of the Art on Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03805/) (2020)
- [Pose Guided Person Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09368/) (2017)
- [Large Scale Image Completion via Co-Modulated Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10428/) (2021)
- [Pluralistic Image Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04227/) (2019)
- [Controllable Person Image Synthesis with Attribute-Decomposed GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12267/) (2020)
- [StyleGAN-Human: A Data-Centric Odyssey of Human Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11823/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Animate Anyone 2: High-Fidelity Character Image Animation with Environment Affordance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06145/) (2025)
- [Insert Anything: Image Insertion via In-Context Editing in DiT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15009/) (2025)
- [MotionWeaver: Holistic 4D-Anchored Framework for Multi-Humanoid Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13326/) (2026)
- [Are Pose Estimators Ready for the Open World? STAGE: A GenAI Toolkit for Auditing 3D Human Pose Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16536/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present ESP, a novel method for context-aware full-body generation, that enables photo-realistic synthesis and inpainting of people wearing clothing that is semantically appropriate for the scene depicted in an input photograph. ESP is conditioned on a 2D pose and contextual cues that are extracted from the photograph of the scene and integrated into the generation process, where the clothing is modeled explicitly with human parsing masks (HPM). Generated HPMs are used as tight guiding masks for inpainting, such that no changes are made to the original background. Our models are trained on a dataset containing a set of in-the-wild photographs of people covering a wide range of different environments. The method is analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively, and we show that ESP outperforms the state-of-the-art on the task of contextual full-body generation.