LookingGlass: Generative Anamorphoses via Laplacian Pyramid Warping
Authors: name: Pascal Chang; name: Sergio Sancho; name: Jingwei Tang; name: Markus Gross; name: Vinicius C. Azevedo
Published: 2025-04-11 18:12:01

Abstract: Anamorphosis refers to a category of images that are intentionally distorted,
making them unrecognizable when viewed directly. Their true form only reveals
itself when seen from a specific viewpoint, which can be through some
catadioptric device like a mirror or a lens. While the construction of these
mathematical devices can be traced back to as early as the 17th century, they
are only interpretable when viewed from a specific vantage point and tend to
lose meaning when seen normally. In this paper, we revisit these famous optical
illusions with a generative twist. With the help of latent rectified flow
models, we propose a method to create anamorphic images that still retain a
valid interpretation when viewed directly. To this end, we introduce Laplacian
Pyramid Warping, a frequency-aware image warping technique key to generating
high-quality visuals. Our work extends Visual Anagrams (arXiv:2311.17919) to
latent space models and to a wider range of spatial transforms, enabling the
creation of novel generative perceptual illusions.