Separation of Manga Line Drawings and Screentones

Abstract

Screentones are unique expressions of Japanese comics (manga), which enrich their visual expression. However, such screentones have a very different visual nature from that of line drawing areas; this prevents us from applying various kinds of image processing techniques to manga. We propose a method for extracting line drawings and removing screentones. We employ Laplacians of Gaussian filters and flow-based differences of Gaussian filters, one for removing screentones and the other for preserving lines, and make a binary mask for separating line drawings from manga by merging the results of the two filters. We show that the proposed method successfully separates line drawings and is better than existing methods in comparative studies.