PriorityCut: Occlusion-aware Regularization for Image Animation

Image animation generates a video of a source image following the motion of a driving video. Self-supervised image animation approaches do not require explicit pose references as inputs, thus offering large flexibility in learning. State-of-the-art self-supervised image animation approaches mostly warp the source image according to the motion of the driving video, and recover the warping artifacts by inpainting. When the source and the driving images have large pose differences, heavy inpainting is necessary. Without guidance, heavily inpainted regions usually suffer from loss of details. While previous data augmentation techniques such as CutMix are effective in regularizing non-warp-based image generation, directly applying them to image animation ignores the difficulty of inpainting on the warped image. We propose PriorityCut, a novel augmentation approach that uses the top-$k$ percent occluded pixels of the foreground to regularize image animation. By taking into account the difficulty of inpainting, PriorityCut preserves better identity than vanilla CutMix and outperforms state-of-the-art image animation models in terms of the pixel-wise difference, low-level similarity, keypoint distance, and feature embedding distance.