title: Deep Geometrized Cartoon Line Inbetweening
summary: We aim to address a significant but understudied problem in the anime
  industry, namely the inbetweening of cartoon line drawings. Inbetweening
  involves generating intermediate frames between two black-and-white line
  drawings and is a time-consuming and expensive process that can benefit from
  automation. However, existing frame interpolation methods that rely on matching
  and warping whole raster images are unsuitable for line inbetweening and often
  produce blurring artifacts that damage the intricate line structures. To
  preserve the precision and detail of the line drawings, we propose a new
  approach, AnimeInbet, which geometrizes raster line drawings into graphs of
  endpoints and reframes the inbetweening task as a graph fusion problem with
  vertex repositioning. Our method can effectively capture the sparsity and
  unique structure of line drawings while preserving the details during
  inbetweening. This is made possible via our novel modules, i.e., vertex
  geometric embedding, a vertex correspondence Transformer, an effective
  mechanism for vertex repositioning and a visibility predictor. To train our
  method, we introduce MixamoLine240, a new dataset of line drawings with ground
  truth vectorization and matching labels. Our experiments demonstrate that
  AnimeInbet synthesizes high-quality, clean, and complete intermediate line
  drawings, outperforming existing methods quantitatively and qualitatively,
  especially in cases with large motions. Data and code are available at
  https://github.com/lisiyao21/AnimeInbet.
paper_authors._id: 6516523cd467ffdc0529102c
paper_authors.name: Li Siyao
paper_authors._id: 6516523cd467ffdc0529102d
paper_authors.name: Tianpei Gu
paper_authors.status: extracted_confirmed
paper_authors.statusLastChangedAt: 2023-09-30T21:08:41.225Z
paper_authors._id: 6435ec65f3b08e267d9c9bbd
paper_authors.avatarUrl: /avatars/7e846e0c91241898171aa35efd7264c0.svg
paper_authors.fullname: Tianpei Gu
paper_authors.type: user
paper_authors.user: gutianpei
paper_authors._id: 6516523cd467ffdc0529102e
paper_authors.name: Weiye Xiao
paper_authors._id: 6516523cd467ffdc0529102f
paper_authors.name: Henghui Ding
paper_authors._id: 6516523cd467ffdc05291030
paper_authors.name: Ziwei Liu
paper_authors._id: 6516523cd467ffdc05291031
paper_authors.name: Chen Change Loy
paper_title: Deep Geometrized Cartoon Line Inbetweening
paper_summary: We aim to address a significant but understudied problem in the anime
  industry, namely the inbetweening of cartoon line drawings. Inbetweening
  involves generating intermediate frames between two black-and-white line
  drawings and is a time-consuming and expensive process that can benefit from
  automation. However, existing frame interpolation methods that rely on matching
  and warping whole raster images are unsuitable for line inbetweening and often
  produce blurring artifacts that damage the intricate line structures. To
  preserve the precision and detail of the line drawings, we propose a new
  approach, AnimeInbet, which geometrizes raster line drawings into graphs of
  endpoints and reframes the inbetweening task as a graph fusion problem with
  vertex repositioning. Our method can effectively capture the sparsity and
  unique structure of line drawings while preserving the details during
  inbetweening. This is made possible via our novel modules, i.e., vertex
  geometric embedding, a vertex correspondence Transformer, an effective
  mechanism for vertex repositioning and a visibility predictor. To train our
  method, we introduce MixamoLine240, a new dataset of line drawings with ground
  truth vectorization and matching labels. Our experiments demonstrate that
  AnimeInbet synthesizes high-quality, clean, and complete intermediate line
  drawings, outperforming existing methods quantitatively and qualitatively,
  especially in cases with large motions. Data and code are available at
  https://github.com/lisiyao21/AnimeInbet.
paper_ai_keywords: geometric embedding vertex correspondence Transformer vertex repositioning visibility predictor graph fusion problem raster line drawings ground truth vectorization MixamoLine240