2023/12/06 by Ryan Burgert, Burgert, Ryan, Xiang Li +7 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Advanced Vision and Imaging #Computer Graphics and Visualization Techniques #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.03817
openalex publication_date 2023/12/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We explore the problem of computationally generating special `prime' images that produce optical illusions when physically arranged and viewed in a certain way. First, we propose a formal definition for this problem. Next, we introduce Diffusion Illusions, the first comprehensive pipeline designed to automatically generate a wide range of these illusions. Specifically, we both adapt the existing `score distillation loss' and propose a new `dream target loss' to optimize a group of differentially parametrized prime images, using a frozen text-to-image diffusion model. We study three types of illusions, each where the prime images are arranged in different ways and optimized using the aforementioned losses such that images derived from them align with user-chosen text prompts or images. We conduct comprehensive experiments on these illusions and verify the effectiveness of our proposed method qualitatively and quantitatively. Additionally, we showcase the successful physical fabrication of our illusions -- as they are all designed to work in the real world. Our code and examples are publicly available at our interactive project website: https://diffusionillusions.com