FreeCHROMA: Generative Chroma Keying with Flexible Background References

In film production, chroma keying composites an approved foreground performance into a new environment, but conventional workflows require coordinated background plates and dedicated harmonization. Recent generative methods often require pre-aligned backgrounds, focus on background-conditioned foreground relighting, or represent the environment only through an edited first frame. These restrictions limit background selection, scene composition, and camera motion while adding preparation or editing effort. We present FreeCHROMA, which adapts a pretrained video diffusion model in a parameter-efficient manner for generative video compositing from one to three unaligned background references. The model integrates the foreground into the referenced environment, preserving foreground identity, motion, and fine visual details while generating a spatiotemporally coherent background. Foreground–background harmonization occurs within the same generation process, without a separate relighting stage. Optional text instructions help disambiguate complex spatial relationships and camera behavior. To train the model, we construct pseudo-paired data from readily available real monocular videos through foreground–background separation and augmentation with existing foundation models. The original videos serve as training targets, while automated processing and quality verification enable scalable data construction. Across reference fidelity, foreground preservation, scene integration, harmonization, and overall video quality, FreeCHROMA consistently outperforms recent compositing and conditional video-generation baselines, with particularly clear gains under camera motion. FreeCHROMA relaxes the constraints of existing tools to enable end-to-end generative chroma keying from unaligned inputs, with exploratory experiments demonstrating its potential in robotics.