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Content archived on 2024-06-18

Computer Assisted Renewal of Classical Cartoon Animations

Final Report Summary - CARTOON (Computer assisted renewal of classical cartoon animations)

1. Final publishable summary report

The CARTOON project developed a new algorithm called LazyBrush allowing interactive labelling of hand-drawn cartoon animations. In contrast to previously published approaches it does not rely on style-specific features and is easily applicable to a broad class of different drawing styles requiring comparable or even less manual effort. In addition to this it is also not sensitive to imprecise placement of brush strokes which makes labelling of thin structures less tedious and brings significant time savings.

The algorithm is described in the paper 'LazyBrush: Flexible painting tool for hand-drawn cartoons' that has been accepted as a full paper for a European premier event in computer graphics: Eurographics 2009 (Munich, Germany, 30 March-3 April 2009) and published as a journal paper in Computer Graphics Forum (Volume 28, Issue 2, pages 599-608). In addition to that couple of speed-up techniques have been developed to allow processing of high-resolution footage used in movie industry. These were presented in a poster titled LazyBrush HD that won the best poster award at SBIM-NPAR 2010 (Annecy, France, 7-10 June 2010).

Although the LazyBrush algorithm was originally motivated by the needs of ink-and-paint pipeline it is applicable in more general contexts such as enhancement of the existing footage, namely the estimation of depth and normal maps necessary for stereoscopic display, 3D-like shading and partial 3D reconstruction. This was demonstrated in the paper 'Adding depth to cartoons using sparse depth (in)equalities' that won prestigious Gunter Enderle best paper award at Eurographics 2010 (Norrkoping, Sweden, 3-7 May 2010) and was published as a journal paper in Computer Graphics Forum (Volume 29, Issue 2, pages 615-623).

CARTOON project also developed a new algorithm able to automatically establish dense correspondences between two cartoon drawings. Similarly to LazyBrush algorithm this new techniques opens potential for implementing various new applications including originally proposed skeleton transfer, unsupervised inbetweening, example-based shape deformation, auto-painting, editing, and motion retargeting. The algorithm is described in the paper 'As-rigid-as-possible image registration for hand-drawn cartoon animations' and was accepted as a full paper for NPAR 2009 (New Orleans, USA, 1-7 August 2009) a premier event in the field of non-photorealistic animation and rendering co-located with SIGGRAPH 2009. It has been published by ACM in proceedings of the Seventh International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering (pages 25-33).
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