VODiff: Controlling Object Visibility Order in Text-to-Image Generation

Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly enhanced the performance of text-to-image models in image synthesis. To enable control over the the spatial locations of the generated objects, diffusion-based methods typically utilize object layout as an auxiliary input. However, we observe that this approach treats all objects as being on the same layer and neglect their visibility order, leading to the synthesis of overlapping objects with incorrect occlusions. To address this limitation, we introduce in this paper a new training-free framework that considers object visibility order explicitly and allows users to place overlapping objects in a stack of layers. Our framework consists of two visibility-based designs. First, we propose a novel Sequential Denoising Process (SDP) to divide the whole image generation into multiple stages for different objects, each stage primarily focuses on an object. Second, we propose a novel Visibility-Order-Aware (VOA) Loss to transform the layout and occlusion constraints into an attention map optimization process to improve the accuracy of synthesizing object occlusions in complex scenes. By merging these two novel components, our framework, dubbed VODiff, enables the generation of photorealistic images that satisfy user-specified spatial constraints and object occlusion relationships. In addition, we introduce VOBench, a diverse benchmark dataset containing 200 curated samples, each with a reference image, text prompts, object visibility orders and layout maps. We conduct extensive evaluations on this dataset to demonstrate the superiority of our approach.