An Approach to Computer-supported Cartooning

An approach to computer-supported cartooning is described which aims at optimizing the image-related working process by introducing comptuer-support in the drawing and painting stages of the traditional cartoon production, especially allowing the automatic coloring of a sequence of digitized images. This is achieved by using a shape matching algorithm to evaluate the similarity of image regions, and by performing an optimum region assignment to identify the corresponding ones and propagate the color information through the image sequence. In order to maintain the use of traditional drawing tools, the first step in the proposed system architecture is the processing of the scanned animators' drawings to enhance their quality and extract meaningful information. Two different system modules allow either the manual coloring of images or the computer-assisted automatic painting of an image sequence. Additional modules allow the construction of a vector representation for the images, the generation of in-betweens, and the conposing of each cartoon frame. The first stages of the system's architecture - image preprocessing, painting and vectorization - are presented. Special emphasis is given to the fundamental ideas behind the computer-assisted painting and the vectorization steps. The competitiveness of the approach, which requires no special hardware or high-performance workstation, is shown