AI-Driven Image Manipulation : Image Outpainting Applied on Fashion Images

Sammanfattning: The e-commerce industry frequently has to deal with displaying product images in a website where the images are provided by the selling partners. The images in question can have drastically different aspect ratios and resolutions which makes it harder to present them while maintaining a coherent user experience. Manipulating images by cropping can sometimes result in parts of the foreground (i.e. product or person within the image) to be cut off. Image outpainting is a technique that allows images to be extended past its boundaries and can be used to alter the aspect ratio of images. Together with object detection for locating the foreground makes it possible to manipulate images without sacrificing parts of the foreground. For image outpainting a deep learning model was trained on product images that can extend images by at least 25%. The model achieves 8.29 FID score, 44.29 PSNR score and 39.95 BRISQUE score. For testing this solution in practice a simple image manipulation pipeline was created which uses image outpainting when needed and it shows promising results. Images can be manipulated in under a second running on ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3060 (12GB) GPU and a few seconds running on a Intel Core i7-8700K (16GB) CPU. There is also a special case of images where the background has been digitally replaced with a solid color and they can be outpainted even faster without deep learning.