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Vectorizing Cartoon Animations
Author(s): Song-Hai Zhang, Tao Chen, Yi-Fei Zhang, Shi-Min Hu, Ralph R. Martin.
Article: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 618--629,
2009.
[BibTeX] [DOI] 
Abstract:
We present a system for vectorizing 2D raster format cartoon animations. The output animations are visually flicker free, smaller in file size, and easy to edit. We identify decorative lines separately from colored regions. We use an accurate and semantically meaningful image decomposition algorithm, supporting an arbitrary color model for each region. To ensure temporal coherence in the output, we reconstruct a universal background for all frames and separately extract foreground regions. Simple user-assistance is required to complete the background. Each region and decorative line is vectorized and stored together with their motions from frame to frame. The contributions of this paper are: 1) the new trapped-ball segmentation method, which is fast, supports nonuniformly colored regions, and allows robust region segmentation even in the presence of imperfectly linked region edges, 2) the separate handling of decorative lines as special objects during image decomposition, avoiding results containing multiple short, thin oversegmented regions, and 3) extraction of a single patch-based background for all frames, which provides a basis for consistent, flicker-free animations.