  Image-to-image translation (I2IT) refers to the process of transforming
images from a source domain to a target domain while maintaining a fundamental
connection in terms of image content. In the past few years, remarkable
advancements in I2IT were achieved by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs),
which nevertheless struggle with translations requiring high precision.
Recently, Diffusion Models have established themselves as the engine of choice
for image generation. In this paper we introduce S2ST, a novel framework
designed to accomplish global I2IT in complex photorealistic images, such as
day-to-night or clear-to-rain translations of automotive scenes. S2ST operates
within the seed space of a Latent Diffusion Model, thereby leveraging the
powerful image priors learned by the latter. We show that S2ST surpasses
state-of-the-art GAN-based I2IT methods, as well as diffusion-based approaches,
for complex automotive scenes, improving fidelity while respecting the target
domain's appearance across a variety of domains. Notably, S2ST obviates the
necessity for training domain-specific translation networks.
