Occlusion-Aware Physics-Semantic Keyframe Selection for Robust Video Editing

Abstract: Video editing has recently achieved remarkable progress with diffusion-based generative models, enabling diverse object-level manipulations from natural language instructions. However, existing methods often struggle under occlusion, viewpoint changes, and fast object motion, where unreliable visual observations lead to inaccurate localization, temporal flickering, and inconsistent edits. In this work, we identify the absence of reliable visual anchors as a fundamental bottleneck in occlusion-robust video editing. To address this issue, we propose an occlusion-aware physics-semantic keyframe selection framework that automatically identifies an optimal anchor frame for downstream editing. Specifically, our method evaluates candidate frames from three complementary perspectives: structural completeness for avoiding truncated observations, cycle-consistent tracking stability for measuring physical reliability, and vision-language-based attribute visibility for ensuring semantic clarity. The selected keyframe is then propagated through bidirectional tracking to generate dense spatiotemporal masks, which are used as auxiliary supervision for a diffusion-based video editing backbone. By transforming occlusion handling from explicit reconstruction into reliable anchor selection, our framework enables precise and temporally consistent editing without requiring manual annotations. Extensive experiments on challenging video editing benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and high-quality performance of our method.