Comicolorization: Semi-Automatic Manga Colorization
This addresses the labor-intensive task of manga colorization for artists and publishers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing colorization methods.
The researchers tackled the problem of colorizing entire manga titles by developing a semi-automatic system that uses reference images to generate plausible colors, achieving consistent character colors across multiple panels.
We developed "Comicolorization", a semi-automatic colorization system for manga images. Given a monochrome manga and reference images as inputs, our system generates a plausible color version of the manga. This is the first work to address the colorization of an entire manga title (a set of manga pages). Our method colorizes a whole page (not a single panel) semi-automatically, with the same color for the same character across multiple panels. To colorize the target character by the color from the reference image, we extract a color feature from the reference and feed it to the colorization network to help the colorization. Our approach employs adversarial loss to encourage the effect of the color features. Optionally, our tool allows users to revise the colorization result interactively. By feeding the color features to our deep colorization network, we accomplish colorization of the entire manga using the desired colors for each panel.