A unified two-stage model for separating superimposed images

A single superimposed image containing two image views causes visual confusion for both human vision and computer vision. Human vision needs a ``develop-then-rival'' process to decompose the superimposed image into two individual images, which effectively suppresses visual confusion. In this paper, we propose a human vision-inspired framework for separating superimposed images. We first propose a network to simulate the development stage, which tries to understand and distinguish the semantic information of the two layers of a single superimposed image. To further simulate the rivalry activation/suppression process in human brains, we carefully design a rivalry stage, which incorporates the original mixed input (superimposed image), the activated visual information (outputs of the development stage) together, and then rivals to get images without ambiguity. Experimental results show that our novel framework effectively separates the superimposed images and significantly improves the performance with better output quality compared with state-of-the-art methods.