Sketching Cartoons by Example

Abstract

We introduce a novel example-based framework for reusing traditional cartoon drawings and animations. In contrast to previous approaches our aim is to design new characters and poses by combining fragments of the original artwork. Using standard image manipulation tool this task is tedious and time consuming. To reduce the amount of manual intervention we combine unsupervised image segmentation, fragment extraction and highquality vectorization. The user can simply select an interesting part in the original image and then adjust it in a new composition using a few control scribbles. Thanks to ease of manipulation proposed sketch-based interface is suitable both for experienced artists and unskilled users (e.g. children) who wish to create new stories in the style of masters. Practical results confirm that using our framework high-quality cartoon drawings can be produced within much shorter time frames as compared with standard approaches.