Hand‐drawn anime line drawing colorization of faces with texture details

Abstract

AbstractAutomatic or semi‐automatic colorization can reduce the burden of illustrators in color illustration production, which is a research area with significant market demand. Texture details in eyes and hair influence the impression of character illustrations. Generally, these details are not expressed in line drawings. Many existing automatic or semi‐automatic colorization methods do not target hand‐drawn line drawings and it is difficult to paint texture details on such drawings. In this paper, we propose the semi‐automatic colorization of character line drawings around faces with texture details. Our method uses a reference image as a color hint and transfers the textures of the reference image to a line drawing. To achieve this, our method uses semantic segmentation masks to match parts of the line drawing with the same parts of the reference image. We create two types of segmentation datasets to train a segmentation network that creates segmentation masks. We transfer texture details to a hand‐drawn line drawing by mapping each part of the reference image to the corresponding part of the line drawing using segmentation masks. We show that our method is more effective for hand‐drawn line drawings than existing methods using qualitative and quantitative evaluations.