AniClipart: Clipart Animation with Text-to-Video Priors
This addresses a domain-specific problem for content creators by automating clipart animation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing text-to-video models with optimizations.
The paper tackles the problem of animating static clipart, which is traditionally labor-intensive, by introducing AniClipart, a system that uses text-to-video priors to generate high-quality animations, outperforming competing methods in text-video alignment, visual identity preservation, and temporal consistency.
Clipart, a pre-made art form, offers a convenient and efficient way of creating visual content. However, traditional workflows for animating static clipart are laborious and time-consuming, involving steps like rigging, keyframing, and inbetweening. Recent advancements in text-to-video generation hold great potential in resolving this challenge. Nevertheless, direct application of text-to-video models often struggles to preserve the visual identity of clipart or generate cartoon-style motion, resulting in subpar animation outcomes. In this paper, we introduce AniClipart, a computational system that converts static clipart into high-quality animations guided by text-to-video priors. To generate natural, smooth, and coherent motion, we first parameterize the motion trajectories of the keypoints defined over the initial clipart image by cubic Bézier curves. We then align these motion trajectories with a given text prompt by optimizing a video Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss and a skeleton fidelity loss. By incorporating differentiable As-Rigid-As-Possible (ARAP) shape deformation and differentiable rendering, AniClipart can be end-to-end optimized while maintaining deformation rigidity. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed AniClipart consistently outperforms the competing methods, in terms of text-video alignment, visual identity preservation, and temporal consistency. Additionally, we showcase the versatility of AniClipart by adapting it to generate layered animations, which allow for topological changes.