LayerD: Decomposing Raster Graphic Designs into Layers
Authors: name: Tomoyuki Suzuki, name: Kang-Jun Liu, name: Naoto Inoue, name: Kota Yamaguchi

Designers craft and edit graphic designs in a layer representation, but
layer-based editing becomes impossible once composited into a raster image. In
this work, we propose LayerD, a method to decompose raster graphic designs into
layers for re-editable creative workflow. LayerD addresses the decomposition
task by iteratively extracting unoccluded foreground layers. We propose a
simple yet effective refinement approach taking advantage of the assumption
that layers often exhibit uniform appearance in graphic designs. As
decomposition is ill-posed and the ground-truth layer structure may not be
reliable, we develop a quality metric that addresses the difficulty. In
experiments, we show that LayerD successfully achieves high-quality
decomposition and outperforms baselines. We also demonstrate the use of LayerD
with state-of-the-art image generators and layer-based editing.