Reference-guided structure-aware deep sketch colorization for cartoons

Digital cartoon production requires extensive manual labor to colorize sketches with visually pleasant color composition and color shading.During colorization,the artist usually takes an existing cartoon image as color guidance,particularly when colorizing related characters or an animation sequence.Reference-guided colorization is more intuitive than colorization with other hints,such as color points or scribbles,or text-based hints.Unfortunately,reference-guided colorization is challenging since the style of the colorized image should match the style of the reference image in terms of both global color composition and local color shading.In this paper,we propose a novel learning-based framework which colorizes a sketch based on a color style feature extracted from a reference color image.Our framework contains a color style extractor to extract the color feature from a color image,a colorization network to generate multi-scale output images by combining a sketch and a color feature,and a multi-scale discriminator to improve the reality of the output image.Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that our method outperforms existing methods,providing both superior visual quality and style reference consistency in the task of reference-based colorization.

A review of image and video colorization: From analogies to deep learning

Image colorization is a classic and important topic in computer graphics,where the aim is to add color to a monochromatic input image to produce a colorful result.In this survey,we present the history of colorization research in chronological order and summarize popular algorithms in this field.Early work on colorization mostly focused on developing techniques to improve the colorization quality.In the last few years,researchers have considered more possibilities such as combining colorization with NLP(natural language processing)and focused more on industrial applications.To better control the color,various types of color control are designed,such as providing reference images or color-scribbles.We have created a taxonomy of the colorization methods according to the input type,divided into grayscale,sketch-based and hybrid.The pros and cons are discussed for each algorithm,and they are compared according to their main characteristics.Finally,we discuss how deep learning,and in particular Generative Adversarial Networks(GANs),has changed this field.