Adding Depth to Cartoons Using Sparse Depth (In)equalities

Daniel Sýkora
Trinity College Dublin
 
David Sedláček
CTU in Prague, FEE
Sun Jinchao
Trinity College Dublin
 
John Dingliana
Trinity College Dublin
 
Steven Collins
Trinity College Dublin

Günter Enderle Best Paper Award



Abstract

This paper presents a novel interactive approach for adding depth information into hand-drawn cartoon images and animations. In comparison to previous depth assignment techniques our solution requires minimal user effort and enables creation of consistent pop-ups in a matter of seconds. Inspired by perceptual studies we formulate a custom tailored optimization framework that tries to mimic the way that a human reconstructs depth information from a single image. Its key advantage is that it completely avoids inputs requiring knowledge of absolute depth and instead uses a set of sparse depth (in)equalities that are much easier to specify. Since these constraints lead to a solution based on quadratic programming that is time consuming to evaluate we propose a simple approximative algorithm yielding similar results with much lower computational overhead. We demonstrate its usefulness in the context of a cartoon animation production pipeline including applications such as enhancement, registration, composition, 3D modelling and stereoscopic display.

Full text   BibTeX
Supplementary material

Computer Graphics Forum 29(2):615–623, 2010

(Eurographics 2010, Norrköping, Sweden, May 2010)

Additional supplementary video



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