# Stable Diffusion-Based Approach for Human De-Occlusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12663 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12663/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 50 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05172/) (2019)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [YOLACT: Real-time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02689/) (2019)
- [Blended Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02779/) (2022)
- [PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08527/) (2021)
- [SOLO: Segmenting Objects by Locations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04488/) (2019)
- [Unleashing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02153/) (2023)
- [Function4D: Real-time Human Volumetric Capture from Very Sparse Consumer RGBD Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01859/) (2021)
- [MAT: Mask-Aware Transformer for Large Hole Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15270/) (2022)
- [BrushNet: A Plug-and-Play Image Inpainting Model with Decomposed Dual-Branch Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06976/) (2024)
- [Deep Occlusion-Aware Instance Segmentation with Overlapping BiLayers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12340/) (2021)
- [TeCH: Text-guided Reconstruction of Lifelike Clothed Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08545/) (2023)
- [Semantic Amodal Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01329/) (2015)
- [Self-Supervised Scene De-occlusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02788/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Inpainting using Multi-Scale Neural Patch Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09969/) (2016)
- [Amodal Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.08202/) (2016)
- [Learning to See the Invisible: End-to-End Trainable Amodal Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08864/) (2018)
- [SeGAN: Segmenting and Generating the Invisible](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10239/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [PHAC: Promptable Human Amodal Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14741/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans can infer the missing parts of an occluded object by leveraging prior knowledge and visible cues. However, enabling deep learning models to accurately predict such occluded regions remains a challenging task. De-occlusion addresses this problem by reconstructing both the mask and RGB appearance. In this work, we focus on human de-occlusion, specifically targeting the recovery of occluded body structures and appearances. Our approach decomposes the task into two stages: mask completion and RGB completion. The first stage leverages a diffusion-based human body prior to provide a comprehensive representation of body structure, combined with occluded joint heatmaps that offer explicit spatial cues about missing regions. The reconstructed amodal mask then serves as a conditioning input for the second stage, guiding the model on which areas require RGB reconstruction. To further enhance RGB generation, we incorporate human-specific textual features derived using a visual question answering (VQA) model and encoded via a CLIP encoder. RGB completion is performed using Stable Diffusion, with decoder fine-tuning applied to mitigate pixel-level degradation in visible regions -- a known limitation of prior diffusion-based de-occlusion methods caused by latent space transformations. Our method effectively reconstructs human appearances even under severe occlusions and consistently outperforms existing methods in both mask and RGB completion. Moreover, the de-occluded images generated by our approach can improve the performance of downstream human-centric tasks, such as 2D pose estimation and 3D human reconstruction. The code will be made publicly available.
