Manga, a popular form of multimodal artwork, has traditionally been overlooked in deep learning advancements due to the absence of a robust dataset and comprehensive annotation. Manga segmentation is the key to the digital migration of manga. There exists a significant domain gap between the manga and the natural images, that fails most existing learning-based methods. To address this gap, we introduce an augmented segmentation annotation for the Manga109 dataset, a collection of 109 manga volumes, that offers intricate artworks in a rich variety of styles. We introduce a detailed annotation that extends beyond the original simple bounding boxes to the segmentation masks with pixel-level precision. It provides object category, location, and instance information that can be used for semantic segmentation and instance segmentation. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of our annotation dataset from various aspects. We further measure the improvement of the state-of-the-art segmentation model after training it with our augmented dataset. The benefits of this augmented dataset are profound, with the potential to significantly enhance manga analysis algorithms and catalyze the novel development in digital art processing and cultural analytics. This annotation, named MangaSeg, is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/MS92/MangaSegmentation.

Abstract Text‐guided video‐to‐video stylization transforms the visual appearance of a source video to a different appearance guided on textual prompts. Existing text‐guided image diffusion models can be extended for stylized video synthesis. However, they struggle to generate videos with both highly detailed appearance and temporal consistency. In this paper, we propose a synchronized multi‐frame diffusion framework to maintain both the visual details and the temporal consistency. Frames are denoised in a synchronous fashion, and more importantly, information of different frames is shared since the beginning of the denoising process. Such information sharing ensures that a consensus, in terms of the overall structure and color distribution, among frames can be reached in the early stage of the denoising process before it is too late. The optical flow from the original video serves as the connection, and hence the venue for information sharing, among frames. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating high‐quality and diverse results in extensive experiments. Our method shows superior qualitative and quantitative results compared to state‐of‐the‐art video editing methods.

Creating a vivid video from the event or scenario in our imagination is a truly fascinating experience. Recent advancements in text-to-video synthesis have unveiled the potential to achieve this with prompts only. While text is convenient in conveying the overall scene context, it may be insufficient to control precisely. In this paper, we explore customized video generation by utilizing text as context description and motion structure (e.g., frame-wise depth) as concrete guidance. Our method, dubbed Make-Your-Video, involves joint-conditional video generation using a Latent Diffusion Model that is pre-trained for still image synthesis and then promoted for video generation with the introduction of temporal modules. This two-stage learning scheme not only reduces the computing resources required, but also improves the performance by transferring the rich concepts available in image datasets solely into video generation. Moreover, we use a simple yet effective causal attention mask strategy to enable longer video synthesis, which mitigates the potential quality degradation effectively. Experimental results show the superiority of our method over existing baselines, particularly in terms of temporal coherence and fidelity to users' guidance. In addition, our model enables several intriguing applications that demonstrate potential for practical usage.

This paper introduces a novel approach to synthesize texture to dress up a 3D object, given a text prompt. Based on the pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model, existing methods usually employ a project-and-inpaint approach, in which a view of the given object is first generated and warped to another view for inpainting. But it tends to generate inconsistent texture due to the asynchronous diffusion of multiple views. We believe that such asynchronous diffusion and insufficient information sharing among views are the root causes of the inconsistent artifacts. In this paper, we propose a synchronized multi-view diffusion approach that allows the diffusion processes from different views to reach a consensus on the generated content early in the process, and hence ensures the texture consistency. To synchronize the diffusion, we share the denoised content among different views in each denoising step, specifically by blending the latent content in the texture domain from overlapping views. Our method demonstrates superior performance in generating consistent, seamless and highly detailed textures, comparing to state-of-the-art methods. © 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

We introduce ToonCrafter, a novel approach that transcends traditional correspondence-based cartoon video interpolation, paving the way for generative interpolation. Traditional methods, that implicitly assume linear motion and the absence of complicated phenomena like dis-occlusion, often struggle with the exaggerated non-linear and large motions with occlusion commonly found in cartoons, resulting in implausible or even failed interpolation results. To overcome these limitations, we explore the potential of adapting live-action video priors to better suit cartoon interpolation within a generative framework. ToonCrafter effectively addresses the challenges faced when applying live-action video motion priors to generative cartoon interpolation. First, we design a toon rectification learning strategy that seamlessly adapts live-action video priors to the cartoon domain, resolving the domain gap and content leakage issues. Next, we introduce a dual-reference-based 3D decoder to compensate for lost details due to the highly compressed latent prior spaces, ensuring the preservation of fine details in interpolation results. Finally, we design a flexible sketch encoder that empowers users with interactive control over the interpolation results. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method not only produces visually convincing and more natural dynamics, but also effectively handles dis-occlusion. The comparative evaluation demonstrates the notable superiority of our approach over existing competitors. Code and model weights are available at https://doubiiu.github.io/projects/ToonCrafter

Vector graphics is broadly used in a variety of forms, such as illustrations, logos, posters, billboards, and printed ads. Despite its broad use, many artists still prefer to draw with pen and paper, which leads to a high demand of converting raster designs into the vector form. In particular, line drawing is a primary art and attracts many research efforts in automatically converting raster line drawings to vector form. However, the existing methods generally adopt a two-step approach, stroke segmentation and vectorization. Without vector guidance, the raster-based stroke segmentation frequently obtains unsatisfying segmentation results, such as over-grouped strokes and broken strokes. In this paper, we make an attempt in proposing an end-to-end vectorization method which directly generates vectorized stroke primitives from raster line drawing in one step. We propose a Transformer-based framework to perform stroke tracing like human does in an automatic stroke-by-stroke way with a novel stroke feature representation and multi-modal supervision to achieve vectorization with high quality and fidelity. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that our method achieves state of the art performance.

Dashed curve is a frequently used curve form and is widely used in various drawing and illustration applications. While humans can intuitively recognize dashed curves from disjoint curve segments based on the law of continuity in Gestalt psychology, it is extremely difficult for computers to model the Gestalt law of continuity and recognize the dashed curves since high-level semantic understanding is needed for this task. The various appear-ances and styles of the dashed curves posed on a potentially noisy background further complicate the task. In this paper, we propose an innovative Transformer-based framework to recognize dashed curves based on both high-level features and low-level clues. The framework manages to learn the computational analogy of the Gestalt Law in various do-mains to locate and extract instances of dashed curves in both raster and vector representations. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the efficiency and ro-bustness of our framework over all existing solutions.