# From Ideal to Real: Stable Video Object Removal under Imperfect Conditions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09283 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09283/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07598/) (2025)
- [VideoComposer: Compositional Video Synthesis with Motion Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02018/) (2023)
- [BasicVSR++: Improving Video Super-Resolution with Enhanced Propagation and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13371/) (2021)
- [OpenVid-1M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02371/) (2024)
- [SkyReels-V2: Infinite-length Film Generative Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13074/) (2025)
- [ProPainter: Improving Propagation and Transformer for Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03897/) (2023)
- [Learning Joint Spatial-Temporal Transformations for Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10247/) (2020)
- [Towards An End-to-End Framework for Flow-Guided Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02663/) (2022)
- [Deep Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01639/) (2019)
- [FuseFormer: Fusing Fine-Grained Information in Transformers for Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02974/) (2021)
- [WISA: World Simulator Assistant for Physics-Aware Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08153/) (2025)
- [VideoPainter: Any-length Video Inpainting and Editing with Plug-and-Play Context Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05639/) (2025)
- [AVID: Any-Length Video Inpainting with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03816/) (2023)
- [VideoGen: A Reference-Guided Latent Diffusion Approach for High Definition Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00398/) (2023)
- [DiffuEraser: A Diffusion Model for Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10018/) (2025)
- [Flow-Guided Transformer for Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06768/) (2022)
- [Video Inpainting by Jointly Learning Temporal Structure and Spatial Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08482/) (2018)
- [UltraVideo: High-Quality UHD Video Dataset with Comprehensive Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13691/) (2025)
- [CoCoCo: Improving Text-Guided Video Inpainting for Better Consistency, Controllability and Compatibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12035/) (2024)
- [AdaPool: Exponential Adaptive Pooling for Information-Retaining Downsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00772/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [From Understanding to Erasing: Towards Complete and Stable Video Object Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01693/) (2026)
- [DualEraser: Joint Video Object and Effect Removal via Balanced Text-Mask Guidance and Decoupled Locator-Preserver](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30045/) (2026)
- [EffectLearner: World-Aware Object-Effect Reasoning for Real-World Video Object Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05565/) (2026)
- [TV-AudioRemover: Joint Text-Visual Guided Sound Removal with Multi-Task Hard-Mixture Curriculum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25864/) (2026)
- [TripleFlow: Training-Free Video Object Removal by Bridging Residual Editing and Native Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39157/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Removing objects from videos remains difficult in the presence of real-world imperfections such as shadows, abrupt motion, and defective masks. Existing diffusion-based video inpainting models often struggle to maintain temporal stability and visual consistency under these challenges. We propose Stable Video Object Removal (SVOR), a robust framework that achieves shadow-free, flicker-free, and mask-defect-tolerant removal through three key designs: (1) Mask Union for Stable Erasure (MUSE), a windowed union strategy applied during temporal mask downsampling to preserve all target regions observed within each window, effectively handling abrupt motion and reducing missed removals; (2) Denoising-Aware Segmentation (DA-Seg), a lightweight segmentation head on a decoupled side branch equipped with Denoising-Aware AdaLN and trained with mask degradation to provide an internal diffusion-aware localization prior without affecting content generation; and (3) Curriculum Two-Stage Training: where Stage I performs self-supervised pretraining on unpaired real-background videos with online random masks to learn realistic background and temporal priors, and Stage II refines on synthetic pairs using mask degradation and side-effect-weighted losses, jointly removing objects and their associated shadows/reflections while improving cross-domain robustness. Extensive experiments show that SVOR attains new state-of-the-art results across multiple datasets and degraded-mask benchmarks, advancing video object removal from ideal settings toward real-world applications. Project page: https://xiaomi-research.github.io/svor/.