Relightful Harmonization: Lighting-aware Portrait Background Replacement
Authors: Mengwei Ren, Wei Xiong, Jae Shin Yoon, Zhixin Shu, Jianming Zhang, HyunJoon Jung, Guido Gerig, He Zhang

Portrait harmonization aims to composite a subject into a new background adjusting its lighting and color to ensure harmony with the background scene. Existing harmonization techniques often only focus on adjusting the global color and brightness of the foreground and ignore crucial illumination cues from the background such as apparent lighting direction leading to unrealistic compositions. We introduce Relightful Harmonization a lighting-aware diffusion model designed to seamlessly harmonize sophisticated lighting effect for the foreground portrait using any background image. Our approach unfolds in three stages. First we introduce a lighting representation module that allows our diffusion model to encode lighting information from target image background. Second we introduce an alignment network that aligns lighting features learned from image background with lighting features learned from panorama environment maps which is a complete representation for scene illumination. Last to further boost the photorealism of the proposed method we introduce a novel data simulation pipeline that generates synthetic training pairs from a diverse range of natural images which are used to refine the model. Our method outperforms existing benchmarks in visual fidelity and lighting coherence showing superior generalization in real-world testing scenarios highlighting its versatility and practicality.