ARtVista: Gateway To Empower Anyone Into Artist

Drawing is an art that enables people to express their imagination and emotions. However, individuals usually face challenges in drawing, especially when translating conceptual ideas into visually coherent representations and bridging the gap between mental visualization and practical execution. In response, we propose ARtVista - a novel system integrating AR and generative AI technologies. ARtVista not only recommends reference images aligned with users' abstract ideas and generates sketches for users to draw but also goes beyond, crafting vibrant paintings in various painting styles. ARtVista also offers users an alternative approach to create striking paintings by simulating the paint-by-number concept on reference images, empowering users to create visually stunning artwork devoid of the necessity for advanced drawing skills. We perform a pilot study and reveal positive feedback on its usability, emphasizing its effectiveness in visualizing user ideas and aiding the painting process to achieve stunning pictures without requiring advanced drawing skills. The source code will be available at https://github.com/htrvu/ARtVista.

iCONTRA: Toward Thematic Collection Design Via Interactive Concept Transfer

Creating thematic collections in industries demands innovative designs and cohesive concepts. Designers may face challenges in maintaining thematic consistency when drawing inspiration from existing objects, landscapes, or artifacts. While AI-powered graphic design tools offer help, they often fail to generate cohesive sets based on specific thematic concepts. In response, we introduce iCONTRA, an interactive CONcept TRAnsfer system. With a user-friendly interface, iCONTRA enables both experienced designers and novices to effortlessly explore creative design concepts and efficiently generate thematic collections. We also propose a zero-shot image editing algorithm, eliminating the need for fine-tuning models, which gradually integrates information from initial objects, ensuring consistency in the generation process without influencing the background. A pilot study suggests iCONTRA's potential to reduce designers' efforts. Experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness in producing consistent and high-quality object concept transfers. iCONTRA stands as a promising tool for innovation and creative exploration in thematic collection design. The source code will be available at: https://github.com/vdkhoi20/iCONTRA.

DM-VTON: Distilled Mobile Real-time Virtual Try-On

The fashion e-commerce industry has witnessed significant growth in recent years, prompting exploring image-based virtual try-on techniques to incorporate Augmented Reality (AR) experiences into online shopping platforms. However, existing research has primarily overlooked a crucial aspect - the runtime of the underlying machine-learning model. While existing methods prioritize enhancing output quality, they often disregard the execution time, which restricts their applications on a limited range of devices. To address this gap, we propose Distilled Mobile Real-time Virtual Try-On (DM-VTON), a novel virtual try-on framework designed to achieve simplicity and efficiency. Our approach is based on a knowledge distillation scheme that leverages a strong Teacher network as supervision to guide a Student network without relying on human parsing. Notably, we introduce an efficient Mobile Generative Module within the Student network, significantly reducing the runtime while ensuring high-quality output. Additionally, we propose Virtual Try-on-guided Pose for Data Synthesis to address the limited pose variation observed in training images. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve 40 frames per second on a single Nvidia Tesla T4 GPU and only take up 37 MB of memory while producing almost the same output quality as other state-of-the-art methods. DM-VTON stands poised to facilitate the advancement of real-time AR applications, in addition to the generation of lifelike attired human figures tailored for diverse specialized training tasks. https://sites.google.com/view/ltnghia/research/DMVTON

VIDES: Virtual Interior Design via Natural Language and Visual Guidance

Interior design is crucial in creating aesthetically pleasing and functional indoor spaces. However, developing and editing interior design concepts requires significant time and expertise. We propose Virtual Interior DESign (VIDES) system in response to this challenge. Leveraging cutting-edge technology in generative AI, our system can assist users in generating and editing indoor scene concepts quickly, given user text description and visual guidance. Using both visual guidance and language as the conditional inputs significantly enhances the accuracy and coherence of the generated scenes, resulting in visually appealing designs. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of VIDES in developing new indoor concepts, changing indoor styles, and replacing and removing interior objects. The system successfully captures the essence of users' descriptions while providing flexibility for customization. Consequently, this system can potentially reduce the entry barrier for indoor design, making it more accessible to users with limited technical skills and reducing the time required to create high-quality images. Individuals who have a background in design can now easily communicate their ideas visually and effectively present their design concepts. https://sites.google.com/view/ltnghia/research/VIDES

SketchANIMAR: Sketch-based 3D Animal Fine-Grained Retrieval

The retrieval of 3D objects has gained significant importance in recent years due to its broad range of applications in computer vision, computer graphics, virtual reality, and augmented reality. However, the retrieval of 3D objects presents significant challenges due to the intricate nature of 3D models, which can vary in shape, size, and texture, and have numerous polygons and vertices. To this end, we introduce a novel SHREC challenge track that focuses on retrieving relevant 3D animal models from a dataset using sketch queries and expedites accessing 3D models through available sketches. Furthermore, a new dataset named ANIMAR was constructed in this study, comprising a collection of 711 unique 3D animal models and 140 corresponding sketch queries. Our contest requires participants to retrieve 3D models based on complex and detailed sketches. We receive satisfactory results from eight teams and 204 runs. Although further improvement is necessary, the proposed task has the potential to incentivize additional research in the domain of 3D object retrieval, potentially yielding benefits for a wide range of applications. We also provide insights into potential areas of future research, such as improving techniques for feature extraction and matching, and creating more diverse datasets to evaluate retrieval performance.

TextANIMAR: Text-based 3D Animal Fine-Grained Retrieval

3D object retrieval is an important yet challenging task, which has drawn more and more attention in recent years. While existing approaches have made strides in addressing this issue, they are often limited to restricted settings such as image and sketch queries, which are often unfriendly interactions for common users. In order to overcome these limitations, this paper presents a novel SHREC challenge track focusing on text-based fine-grained retrieval of 3D animal models. Unlike previous SHREC challenge tracks, the proposed task is considerably more challenging, requiring participants to develop innovative approaches to tackle the problem of text-based retrieval. Despite the increased difficulty, we believe that this task has the potential to drive useful applications in practice and facilitate more intuitive interactions with 3D objects. Five groups participated in our competition, submitting a total of 114 runs. While the results obtained in our competition are satisfactory, we note that the challenges presented by this task are far from being fully solved. As such, we provide insights into potential areas for future research and improvements. We believe that we can help push the boundaries of 3D object retrieval and facilitate more user-friendly interactions via vision-language technologies.