Towards High-fidelity Head Blending with Chroma Keying for Industrial Applications

We introduce an industrial Head Blending pipeline for the task of seamlessly integrating an actor's head onto a target body in digital content creation. The key challenge stems from discrepancies in head shape and hair structure, which lead to unnatural boundaries and blending artifacts. Existing methods treat foreground and background as a single task, resulting in suboptimal blending quality. To address this problem, we propose CHANGER, a novel pipeline that decouples background integration from foreground blending. By utilizing chroma keying for artifact-free background generation and introducing Head shape and long Hair augmentation ($H^2$ augmentation) to simulate a wide range of head shapes and hair styles, CHANGER improves generalization on innumerable various real-world cases. Furthermore, our Foreground Predictive Attention Transformer (FPAT) module enhances foreground blending by predicting and focusing on key head and body regions. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our CHANGER outperforms state-of-the-art methods, delivering high-fidelity, industrial-grade results.

Deep Learning-based Synthetic High-Resolution In-Depth Imaging Using an Attachable Dual-element Endoscopic Ultrasound Probe

Endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) imaging has a trade-off between resolution and penetration depth. By considering the in-vivo characteristics of human organs, it is necessary to provide clinicians with appropriate hardware specifications for precise diagnosis. Recently, super-resolution (SR) ultrasound imaging studies, including the SR task in deep learning fields, have been reported for enhancing ultrasound images. However, most of those studies did not consider ultrasound imaging natures, but rather they were conventional SR techniques based on downsampling of ultrasound images. In this study, we propose a novel deep learning-based high-resolution in-depth imaging probe capable of offering low- and high-frequency ultrasound image pairs. We developed an attachable dual-element EUS probe with customized low- and high-frequency ultrasound transducers under small hardware constraints. We also designed a special geared structure to enable the same image plane. The proposed system was evaluated with a wire phantom and a tissue-mimicking phantom. After the evaluation, 442 ultrasound image pairs from the tissue-mimicking phantom were acquired. We then applied several deep learning models to obtain synthetic high-resolution in-depth images, thus demonstrating the feasibility of our approach for clinical unmet needs. Furthermore, we quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed the results to find a suitable deep-learning model for our task. The obtained results demonstrate that our proposed dual-element EUS probe with an image-to-image translation network has the potential to provide synthetic high-frequency ultrasound images deep inside tissues.