FreeDrag: Feature Dragging for Reliable Point-based Image Editing

Pengyang Ling, Lin Chen, Pan Zhang, Huaian Chen, Yi Jin, Jinjin Zheng; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 6860-6870

To serve the intricate and varied demands of image editing precise and flexible manipulation in image content is indispensable. Recently Drag-based editing methods have gained impressive performance. However these methods predominantly center on point dragging resulting in two noteworthy drawbacks namely "miss tracking" where difficulties arise in accurately tracking the predetermined handle points and "ambiguous tracking" where tracked points are potentially positioned in wrong regions that closely resemble the handle points. To address the above issues we propose FreeDrag a feature dragging methodology designed to free the burden on point tracking. The FreeDrag incorporates two key designs i.e. template feature via adaptive updating and line search with backtracking the former improves the stability against drastic content change by elaborately controlling the feature updating scale after each dragging while the latter alleviates the misguidance from similar points by actively restricting the search area in a line. These two technologies together contribute to a more stable semantic dragging with higher efficiency. Comprehensive experimental results substantiate that our approach significantly outperforms pre-existing methodologies offering reliable point-based editing even in various complex scenarios.