SmartMask: Context Aware High-Fidelity Mask Generation for Fine-grained Object Insertion and Layout Control
Authors: Jaskirat Singh, Jianming Zhang, Qing Liu, Cameron Smith, Zhe Lin, Liang Zheng

The field of generative image inpainting and object insertion has made significant progress with the recent advent of latent diffusion models. Utilizing a precise object mask can greatly enhance these applications. However due to the challenges users encounter in creating high-fidelity masks there is a tendency for these methods to rely on more coarse masks (e.g. bounding box) for these applications. This results in limited control and compromised background content preservation. To overcome these limitations we introduce SmartMask which allows any novice user to create detailed masks for precise object insertion. Combined with a ControlNet-Inpaint model our experiments demonstrate that SmartMask achieves superior object insertion quality preserving the background content more effectively than previous methods. Notably unlike prior works the proposed approach can also be used even without user-mask guidance which allows it to perform mask-free object insertion at diverse positions and scales. Furthermore we find that when used iteratively with a novel instruction-tuning based planning model SmartMask can be used to design detailed layouts from scratch. As compared with user-scribble based layout design we observe that SmartMask allows for better quality outputs with layout-to-image generation methods.