Video Codec for Classical Cartoon Animations with Hardware Accelerated Playback
Advances in Visual Computing (Proceedings of ISVC 2005) 1(43):50, 2005
We introduce a novel approach to video compression which is suitable for traditional outline-based cartoon animations. In this case the dynamic foreground consists of several homogeneous regions and the background is static textural image. For this drawing style we show how to recover hybrid representation where the background is stored as a single bitmap and the foreground as a sequence of vector images. This allows us to preserve compelling visual quality as well as spatial scalability even for low encoding bit-rates. We also introduce an efficient approach to play back compressed animations in real-time on commodity graphics hardware. Practical results confirm that for the same storage requirements our framework provides better visual quality as compared to standard video compression techniques.