Abstract
Old cartoon classics have the lasting power to strike the resonance and fantasies of audiences today. However, cartoon animations from earlier years suffered from noise, low resolution, and dull lackluster color due to the improper storage environment of the film materials and limitations in the manufacturing process. In this work, we propose a deep learning-based cartoon remastering application that investigates and integrates noise removal, super-resolution, and color enhancement to improve the presentation of old cartoon animations. We employ multi-task learning methods in the denoising part and color enhancement part individually to guide the model to focus on the structure lines so that the generated image retains the sharpness and color of the structure lines. We evaluate existing super-resolution methods for cartoon inputs and find the best one that can guarantee the sharpness of the structure lines and maintain the texture of images. Moreover, we propose a reference-free color enhancement method that leverages a pre-trained classifier for old and new cartoons to guide color mapping.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availibility
The data are not publicly available due to the containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.
References
Afifi, M., Brubaker, M.A., Brown, M.S.: Histogan: Controlling colors of gan-generated and real images via color histograms. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp. 7941–7950 (2021)
Chen, L., Chu, X., Zhang, X., Sun, J.: Simple baselines for image restoration. arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.04676 (2022)
Chen, S.Y., Zhang, J.Q., Gao, L., He, Y., Xia, S., Shi, M., Zhang, F.L.: Active colorization for cartoon line drawings. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 28(2), 1198–1208 (2020)
Gharbi, M., Chen, J., Barron, J.T., Hasinoff, S.W., Durand, F.: Deep bilateral learning for real-time image enhancement. ACM Trans. Graph. (TOG) 36(4), 1–12 (2017)
Goodfellow, I., Pouget-Abadie, J., Mirza, M., Xu, B., Warde-Farley, D., Ozair, S., Courville, A., Bengio, Y.: Generative adversarial networks. Commun. ACM 63(11), 139–144 (2020)
Gu, C., Lu, X., Zhang, C.: Continuous color transfer. arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.13626 (2020)
He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., Sun, J.: Deep residual learning for image recognition. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp. 770–778 (2016)
He, M., Chen, D., Liao, J., Sander, P.V., Yuan, L.: Deep exemplar-based colorization. ACM Trans. Graph. (TOG) 37(4), 1–16 (2018)
He, M., Liao, J., Chen, D., Yuan, L., Sander, P.V.: Progressive color transfer with dense semantic correspondences. ACM Trans. Graph. (TOG) 38(2), 1–18 (2019)
Ho, M.M., Zhou, J.: Deep preset: Blending and retouching photos with color style transfer. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, pp. 2113–2121 (2021)
Hong, K., Jeon, S., Yang, H., Fu, J., Byun, H.: Domain-aware universal style transfer. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 14609–14617 (2021)
Higumax, I.: Github. [EB/OL]. https://github.com/Dakini/AnimeColorDeOldify Accessed November 2, 2021 (2021)
Higumax, I.: Github. [EB/OL]. https://github.com/higumax/sketchKeras-pytorch Accessed August 25, 2020 (2020)
Nihui, I.: Real-cugan. [EB/OL]. https://github.com/nihui/realcugan-ncnn-vulkan Accessed July 28, 2022 (2022)
Iizuka, S., Simo-Serra, E.: Deepremaster: temporal source-reference attention networks for comprehensive video enhancement. ACM Trans. Graph. (TOG) 38(6), 1–13 (2019)
Johnson, J., Alahi, A., Fei-Fei, L.: Perceptual losses for real-time style transfer and super-resolution. In: Computer Vision–ECCV 2016: 14th European Conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 11–14, 2016, Proceedings, Part II 14, pp. 694–711. Springer (2016)
Kingma, D.P., Ba, J.: Adam: A method for stochastic optimization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6980 (2014)
Lahitani, A.R., Permanasari, A.E., Setiawan, N.A.: Cosine similarity to determine similarity measure: Study case in online essay assessment. In: 2016 4th International Conference on Cyber and IT Service Management, pp. 1–6. IEEE (2016)
Ledig, C., Theis, L., Huszár, F., Caballero, J., Cunningham, A., Acosta, A., Aitken, A., Tejani, A., Totz, J., Wang, Z., et al.: Photo-realistic single image super-resolution using a generative adversarial network. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp. 4681–4690 (2017)
Lee, J., Son, H., Lee, G., Lee, J., Cho, S., Lee, S.: Deep color transfer using histogram analogy. Vis. Comput. 36(10), 2129–2143 (2020)
Li, Y., Liu, M.Y., Li, X., Yang, M.H., Kautz, J.: A closed-form solution to photorealistic image stylization. In: Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), pp. 453–468 (2018)
Liang, J., Cao, J., Sun, G., Zhang, K., Van Gool, L., Timofte, R.: Swinir: Image restoration using swin transformer. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 1833–1844 (2021)
Luan, F., Paris, S., Shechtman, E., Bala, K.: Deep photo style transfer. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp. 4990–4998 (2017)
Ma, L., Ma, T., Liu, R., Fan, X., Luo, Z.: Toward fast, flexible, and robust low-light image enhancement. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 5637–5646 (2022)
Nagadomi, V.I.: waifu2x. [EB/OL]. https://github.com/nagadomi/waifu2x Accessed October 11, 2015 (2015)
Pitie, F., Kokaram, A.C., Dahyot, R.: N-dimensional probability density function transfer and its application to color transfer. In: Tenth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV’05) Volume 1, vol. 2, pp. 1434–1439. IEEE (2005)
Reinhard, E., Adhikhmin, M., Gooch, B., Shirley, P.: Color transfer between images. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 21(5), 34–41 (2001)
Ronneberger, O., Fischer, P., Brox, T.: U-net: Convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation. In: International Conference on Medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention, pp. 234–241. Springer (2015)
Shi, M., Zhang, J.Q., Chen, S.Y., Gao, L., Lai, Y.K., Zhang, F.L.: Deep line art video colorization with a few references. arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.10685 (2020)
Song, Y., Qian, H., Du, X.: Starenhancer: Learning real-time and style-aware image enhancement. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 4126–4135 (2021)
Tomasi, C., Manduchi, R.: Bilateral filtering for gray and color images. In: Sixth international conference on computer vision (IEEE Cat. No. 98CH36271), pp. 839–846. IEEE (1998)
Torrey, L., Shavlik, J.: Transfer learning. In: Handbook of Research on Machine Learning Applications and Trends: Algorithms Methods and Techniques, pp. 242–264. IGI global, Pennsylvania (2010)
Wan, Z., Zhang, B., Chen, D., Liao, J.: Bringing old films back to life. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 17694–17703 (2022)
Wan, Z., Zhang, B., Chen, D., Zhang, P., Chen, D., Liao, J., Wen, F.: Bringing old photos back to life. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp. 2747–2757 (2020)
Wang, X., Xie, L., Dong, C., Shan, Y.: Real-esrgan: Training real-world blind super-resolution with pure synthetic data. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 1905–1914 (2021)
Yu, S., Park, B., Jeong, J.: Deep iterative down-up CNN for image denoising. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, pp. 0 (2019)
Zhang, B., He, M., Liao, J., Sander, P.V., Yuan, L., Bermak, A., Chen, D.: Deep exemplar-based video colorization. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp. 8052–8061 (2019)
Zhang, L., Zhang, L., Mou, X., Zhang, D.: FSIM: A feature similarity index for image quality assessment. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 20(8), 2378–2386 (2011)
Zhang, R., Isola, P., Efros, A.A., Shechtman, E., Wang, O.: The unreasonable effectiveness of deep features as a perceptual metric (2018)
Zhang, Y., Li, K., Li, K., Wang, L., Zhong, B., Fu, Y.: Image super-resolution using very deep residual channel attention networks. In: Proceedings of the European conference on computer vision (ECCV), pp. 286–301 (2018)
Zhang, Y., Yang, Q.: A survey on multi-task learning. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 34(12), 5586–5609 (2021)
Zhu, J.Y., Park, T., Isola, P., Efros, A.A.: Unpaired image-to-image translation using cycle-consistent adversarial networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision, pp. 2223–2232 (2017)
Funding
This work was supported in part by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61973221, 62002232 and 62273241), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China (No. 2019A1515011165), the Major Project of the New Generation of Artificial Intelligence (No. 2018AAA0102900), the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No.UGC/FDS11/E02/21).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors have no conflicts of interest/competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Liu, Y., Li, C., Liu, X. et al. AddCR: a data-driven cartoon remastering. Vis Comput 39, 3741–3753 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-023-02962-3
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-023-02962-3