Egocentric "walking tour" videos provide a rich source of image data to develop rich and diverse visual models of environments around the world. However, the significant presence of humans in frames of these videos due to crowds and eye-level camera perspectives mitigates their usefulness in environment modeling applications. We focus on addressing this challenge by developing a generative algorithm that can realistically remove (i.e., inpaint) humans and their associated shadow effects from walking tour videos. Key to our approach is the construction of a rich semi-synthetic dataset of video clip pairs to train this generative model. Each pair in the dataset consists of an environment-only background clip, and a composite clip of walking humans with simulated shadows overlaid on the background. We randomly sourced both foreground and background components from real egocentric walking tour videos around the world to maintain visual diversity. We then used this dataset to fine-tune the state-of-the-art Casper video diffusion model for object and effects inpainting, and demonstrate that the resulting model performs far better than Casper both qualitatively and quantitatively at removing humans from walking tour clips with significant human presence and complex backgrounds. Finally, we show that the resulting generated clips can be used to build successful 3D/4D models of urban locations.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Locations of background video clips in EgoCrowds . Training clip locations are in green, and testing locations are in red. The full list of city names are in Supplementary.
Figure 3: Overview of our data construction pipeline. Both background and foreground clips are sourced from real “ walking tour ” videos. The foreground clips were selected to ensure an approximately uniform distribution across different Crowd% levels. For each instance, we generate a soft shadow with randomized strength and angle by applying an affine transform to the human mask (red dots indicate pivot points).
Figure 4: Shadow injection with varying α values. As α ranges from 0.2 (a) to 0.8 (d), the shadow intensity appears stronger.
Figure 5: Qualitative comparison. Red boxes indicate failures to remove humans or their shadows and yellow boxes highlight areas where the background is over-smoothed instead of being filled with plausible content. When there are fewer people and the background is relatively simple, as in (a) Jakarta, all methods perform reasonably well. However, performance degrades as masks become larger and backgrounds more complex. Also, in particular, ProPainter [ 48 ] and DiffuEraser [ 18 ] struggle when the cast shadow is sharp (i.e., less diffused). Casper [ 17 ] is robust at associating effects, but when the mask is large it often hallucinates objects or people inside the masked region. In contrast, our method shows greater robustness for large masks, preserving background structure with fewer noticeable artifacts.
Crowd%
(0–10%)
(10–20%)
(20–30%)
(30–40%)
(40–50%)
Average
PSNR ↑
LPIPS ↓
DreamSim ↓
PSNR ↑
LPIPS ↓
DreamSim ↓
PSNR ↑
LPIPS ↓
DreamSim ↓
PSNR ↑
LPIPS ↓
DreamSim ↓
PSNR ↑
LPIPS ↓
DreamSim ↓
PSNR ↑
LPIPS ↓
DreamSim ↓
ProPainter [ 48 ]
31.81
0.058
0.011
28.87
0.088
0.019
25.50
0.128
0.056
21.98
0.192
0.114
20.93
0.238
0.134
25.82
0.141
0.067
DiffuEraser [ 18 ]
31.91
0.055
0.009
28.73
0.079
0.014
24.68
0.112
0.035
22.18
0.171
0.067
22.27
0.181
0.062
25.95
0.120
0.037
Casper [ 17 ]
31.41
0.073
0.010
28.72
0.092
0.014
23.97
0.118
0.025
19.88
0.185
0.052
19.24
0.185
0.052
24.64
0.130
0.029
Ours
32.39
0.065
0.007
29.36
0.086
0.011
26.31
0.108
0.020
22.34
0.170
0.039
23.31
0.161
0.031
26.74
0.118
0.022
Table 1: Quantitative comparison across varying crowd% levels. We evaluate the removal-inpaint quality on our synthetic dataset of 7 different cities (35 videos in total). Higher PSNR indicates better reconstruction quality, while lower LPIPS and DreamSim indicate higher perceptual similarity. Best results are highlighted in red and second-best in yellow.
Figure 6: Ablation results across temporal frames. Red boxes indicate failures in capturing shadows, and the yellow boxes highlight a zoomed-in region for inpainting comparison. (a) Vanilla Casper output (baseline). (b) Finetuned on our data without shadow simulation. (c) Trained using only smaller masks ( Crowd% 0–10). (d) Our full finetuned model with shadow injection and uniform mask distribution across different Crowd% levels.
Component Enabled
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
DreamSim ↓
Shadow
Full Crowd%
✗
✗
24.64
0.868
0.130
0.029
✗
✓
25.09
0.870
0.128
0.028
✓
✗
26.60
0.882
0.120
0.024
✓
✓
26.74
0.881
0.118
0.022
Table 2: Ablation study on model components during the data construction. The first row shows the original Casper model without finetuning. Without ‘Shadow’ drops all shadow injection, and without ‘Full Crowd% ’ only uses masks with lower occupancy levels ( Crowd% 0–10 ).
Figure 7: SpatialTrackerV2 [ 41 ] 4D reconstruction visualization results for three scenes. We compare results using raw walking tour video inputs (top) versus our crowd-removed versions (bottom). Each image displays the inferred 3D point clouds for the scene visualized from the camera viewpoint of the final video frame, with overlaid colored circles corresponding to point tracks in the 3D space. Points on static objects should not move. When comparing regions of static objects between the top and bottom rows (such as in the red circles), we see that point tracks exhibit greater movement, and therefore greater errors, using the raw videos. Furthermore, the CrowdEraser cleaned videos produce better background details (e.g., wall patterns in Marrakech) and denser point clouds (e.g., right side in Istanbul). We provide further scene samples in Supplementary.
Figure 8: Examples of difficult cases (limitations) for CrowdEraser . (a) For long videos with sustained large occlusions, inpainted regions lack temporal consistency across the entire video. (b) In high Crowd% scenarios, the model struggles to recover fine-grained, high frequency details, resulting in artifacts.
Scene
Birmingham
Boston
Capetown
Chicago
Dubai
Rome
Zurich
PSNR ↑
DreamSim ↓
PSNR ↑
DreamSim ↓
PSNR ↑
DreamSim ↓
PSNR ↑
DreamSim ↓
PSNR ↑
DreamSim ↓
PSNR ↑
DreamSim ↓
PSNR ↑
DreamSim ↓
ProPainter [ 48 ]
27.77
0.052
26.00
0.049
25.86
0.059
25.91
0.053
22.34
0.050
29.97
0.019
25.76
0.059
DiffuEraser [ 18 ]
27.25
0.034
25.49
0.042
25.43
0.050
25.59
0.036
22.65
0.042
29.86
0.013
25.14
0.049
Casper [ 17 ]
26.15
0.028
25.12
0.031
24.20
0.035
26.02
0.022
23.14
0.027
29.44
0.012
25.21
0.027
Ours
26.58
0.022
26.00
0.025
25.50
0.026
27.08
0.019
24.81
0.019
30.31
0.009
25.99
0.022
Table 3: Quantitative comparison across cities. Best results are highlighted in red and second-best in yellow. Our CrowdEraser consistently achieves the best DreamSim, reflecting superior perceptual quality.
Figure 12: Baseline comparison across temporal frames for the “Istanbul” scene in Figure 5 . Red boxes indicate failures in foreground removal or shadow handling. Casper [ 23 ] struggles with larger masks, producing noticeable hallucinations within masked areas, while DiffuEraser [ 18 ] has difficulty handling shadows and removing associated objects.
Figure 13: Baseline comparison across temporal frames for the “Chicago” scene in Figure 5 . Red boxes highlight failures in foreground removal or shadow handling. DiffuEraser [ 18 ] struggles to associate shadows and obejects, leading to floating shadows and objects.
Figure 14: SpatialTrackerV2 4D reconstruction results. We compare results using raw walking tour video inputs (top) versus our crowd-removed versions (bottom). Each image displays the inferred 3D point clouds for the scene visualized from the camera viewpoint of the initial, middle, and final video frames, with overlaid colored circles corresponding to point tracks in the 3D space. Tracking points remain more stable in static background regions, indicating that our crowd removal leads to more reliable and robust reconstruction. Moreover, the resulting point clouds are denser and more consistent, benefiting downstream tasks such as scene modeling and 3D novel view synthesis.
Figure 15: SpatialTrackerV2 4D reconstruction results. We compare results using raw walking tour video inputs (top) versus our crowd-removed versions (bottom). Each image displays the inferred 3D point clouds for the scene visualized from the camera viewpoint of the initial, middle, and final video frames, with overlaid colored circles corresponding to point tracks in the 3D space. Tracking points remain more stable in static background regions, indicating that our crowd removal leads to more reliable and robust reconstruction. Moreover, the resulting point clouds are denser and more consistent, benefiting downstream tasks such as scene modeling and 3D novel view synthesis.
Table 4: Training dataset sources. Background and foreground video sources used to construct EgoCrowds . For cities where a single video did not provide sufficient clips, multiple videos were collected to ensure sufficient coverage.
Continent
Country
City / Area
URL(s)
Test Data Background
Africa
South Africa
Cape Town
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG_SV5aSBqQ
Asia
United Arab Emirates
Dubai
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mElSLruob6c
Europe
Italy
Rome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpRDEoEQpwk
Europe
Switzerland
Zurich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcRW2OHqC2o
Europe
UK
Birmingham
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlzFH4yE2Z8
Table 5: Quantitative test dataset sources. Background and foreground video sources used in the quantitative evaluation dataset.
Continent
Country
City
URL(s)
Crowd Walking Tour Video Sources
Asia
India
Mumbai
https://youtu.be/_2GM4gVlors
Asia
Japan
Tokyo
https://youtu.be/jeQd-n7Rot0
Asia
Japan
Kyoto
https://youtu.be/OhOlwqjt_Lg
Asia
Thailand
Bangkok
https://youtu.be/sWRoDRYi1Lk
Asia
Indonesia
Jakarta
https://youtu.be/2lSUV5KZgwI
Table 6: Qualitative test dataset sources. Real walking tour video sources used for qualitative evaluation. For cities where a single video did not provide sufficient clips, multiple videos were collected to ensure sufficient coverage.
Image inpainting reconstructs missing or corrupted image regions using surrounding context, learned visual priors, and optional structural or reference guidance.
We address the problem of generating a 3D-consistent, navigable environment that is spatially grounded: a simulation of a real location. Existing video generative models can produce a plausible sequence that is consistent with a text (T2V) or image (I2V) prompt. However, the capability to reconstruct the real world under arbitrary weather conditions and dynamic object configurations is essential for downstream applications including autonomous driving and robotics simulation. To this end, we present CityRAG, a video generative model that leverages large corpora of geo-registered data as context to ground generation to the physical scene, while maintaining learned priors for complex motion and appearance changes. CityRAG relies on temporally unaligned training data, which teaches the model to semantically disentangle the underlying scene from its transient attributes. Our experiments demonstrate that CityRAG can generate coherent minutes-long, physically grounded video sequences, maintain weather and lighting conditions over thousands of frames, achieve loop closure, and navigate complex trajectories to reconstruct real-world geography.
Gene Chou, Charles Herrmann, Kyle Genova +6
1Google · 2Cornell University · 3Stanford University
We present World2Motion, a framework that generates scene-aware 3D human motion and corresponding video from a single image and a text prompt. While existing 3D motion generators learn from motion datasets, their generalization is constrained by limited coverage of environments. In contrast, video world models such as Cosmos 3 offer broader environmental priors but are not designed for full-body motion generation; recovering motion from their generated videos requires costly two-stage inference. To address these, we turn Cosmos 3 into a single-stage 3D motion generator. This adaptation has two challenges: the scarcity of paired video--motion data and temporal instability in the generated motion. First, we construct a training dataset combining synthetic video--motion pairs with real videos paired with estimated 3D motion. Second, we propose a shift-decoupled noise schedule that assigns different noise levels to video and motion through shared denoising progress. This design accommodates the different denoising requirements of the two modalities, reducing motion jitter. Experiments on a multi-source interaction benchmark show that World2Motion has better motion--text alignment and scene interaction compared with the evaluated 3D motion generators. It also matches the interaction success rate of the two-stage baseline while achieving approximately 3.3× faster inference. Our project page is available at https://fyantu.github.io/World2Motion/.
Fangyuan Tu, Xiangyue Zhang, Yiyi Cai +8
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology · The University of Tokyo · Institute of Science Tokyo +1
Existing video object removal methods excel at inpainting content "behind" the object and correcting appearance-level artifacts such as shadows and reflections. However, when the removed object has more significant interactions, such as collisions with other objects, current models fail to correct them and produce implausible results. We present VOID, a video object removal framework designed to perform physically-plausible inpainting in these complex scenarios. To train the model, we generate a new paired dataset of counterfactual object removals using Kubric and HUMOTO, where removing an object requires altering downstream physical interactions. During inference, a vision-language model identifies regions of the scene affected by the removed object. These regions are then used to guide a video diffusion model that generates physically consistent counterfactual outcomes. Experiments on both synthetic and real data show that our approach better preserves consistent scene dynamics after object removal compared to prior video object removal methods. We hope this framework sheds light on how to make video editing models better simulators of the world through high-level causal reasoning.
Saman Motamed, William Harvey, Benjamin Klein +3
Netflix · INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”