Editable Image Geometric Abstraction via Neural Primitive Assembly

Abstract

This work explores a novel image geometric abstraction paradigm based on assembly out of a pool of pre-defined simple parametric primitives (i.e., triangle, rectangle, circle and semicircle), facilitating controllable shape editing in images. While cast as a mixed combinatorial and continuous optimization problem, the above task is approximately reformulated within a token translation neural framework that simultaneously outputs primitive assignments and corresponding transformation and color parameters in an image-to-set manner, thus bypassing complex/non-differentiable graph-matching iterations. To relax the searching space and address the vanishing gradient issue, a novel Neural Soft Assignment scheme that well explores the quasi-equivalence between the assignment in Bipartite b-Matching and opacity-aware weighted multiple rasterization combination is introduced, drastically reducing the optimization complexity. Without ground-truth image abstraction labeling (i.e., vectorized representation), the whole pipeline is end-to-end trainable in a self-supervised manner, based on the linkage of differentiable rasterization techniques. Extensive experiments on several datasets well demonstrate that our framework is able to predict highly compelling vectorized geometric abstraction results with a combination of ONLY four simple primitives, also with VERY straightforward shape editing capability by simple replacement of primitive type, compared to previous image abstraction and image vectorization methods.