Colorization of Line Drawings with Empty Pupils

Abstract

Many studies have recently applied deep learning to the automatic colorization of line drawings. However, it is difficult to paint empty pupils using existing methods because the convolutional neural network are trained with pupils that have edges, which are generated from color images using image processing. Most actual line drawings have empty pupils that artists must paint in. In this paper, we propose a novel network model that transfers the pupil details in a reference color image to input line drawings with empty pupils. We also propose a method for accurately and automatically colorizing eyes. In this method, eye patches are extracted from a reference color image and automatically added to an input line drawing as color hints using our pupil position estimation network.