LayerD: Decomposing Raster Graphic Designs into Layers

ICCV 2025

Tomoyuki Suzuki1, Kang-Jun Liu2, Naoto Inoue1, Kota Yamaguchi1
1CyberAgent, 2Tohoku University
Paper Code

LayerD decomposes raster graphic design images into layers, where each design contains various elements such as typographic entities, embellishments, vector shapes, or even image materials. Once decomposed, one can apply image editing operations such as color conversion or translation at the layer level, or further apply other post-processing such as OCR to vectorize each raster layer.

Abstract

Designers craft and edit graphic designs in a layer representation, but layer-based editing becomes impossible once composited into a raster image. In this work, we propose LayerD, a method to decompose raster graphic designs into layers for re-editable creative workflow. LayerD addresses the decomposition task by iteratively extracting unoccluded foreground layers. We propose a simple yet effective refinement approach taking advantage of the assumption that layers often exhibit uniform appearance in graphic designs. As decomposition is ill-posed and the ground-truth layer structure may not be reliable, we develop a quality metric that addresses the difficulty. In experiments, we show that LayerD successfully achieves high-quality decomposition and outperforms baselines. We also demonstrate the use of LayerD with state-of-the-art image generators and layer-based editing.

Decomposition Examples

Below are examples of layer decomposition results by LayerD. The leftmost column shows the input images, and the other columns show the decomposed layers from back to front. You can find more results in the paper.

Approach

LayerD is simple: it repeatedly extracts top layers and completes backgrounds until all layers are extracted. We define top layers as all unoccluded layers in the front. LayerD also includes layer refinement processes for each step, which leverage the flat color assumption of layers in graphic designs.

Application

Once decomposed by LayerD, the layers can be easily manipulated for various editing tasks. Below are examples of layer-based editing applications enabled by our decomposition.

Application Examples

Citation

@inproceedings{suzuki2025layerd,
  title={LayerD: Decomposing Raster Graphic Designs into Layers},
  author={Suzuki, Tomoyuki and Liu, Kang-Jun and Inoue, Naoto and Yamaguchi, Kota},
  booktitle={ICCV},
  year={2025}
}