Boundary-aware texture region segmentation from manga

作     者：Xueting Liu Chengze Li Tien-Tsin Wong 

作者机构：The Chinese University of Hong KongHong KongChina Shenzhen Research Institutethe Chinese University ofHong KongShenzhenChina 

出 版 物：《Computational Visual Media》 (计算可视媒体（英文版）)

年 卷 期：2017年第3卷第1期

页      面：61-71页

核心收录：

学科分类：08[工学] 080203[工学-机械设计及理论] 0802[工学-机械工程] 

基　　金：supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Project No.61272293) Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region under RGC General Research Fund(Project Nos.CUHK14200915 and CUHK14217516) 

主　　题：manga texture segmentation 

摘      要：Due to the lack of color in manga(Japanese comics), black-and-white textures are often used to enrich visual experience. With the rising need to digitize manga, segmenting texture regions from manga has become an indispensable basis for almost all manga processing, from vectorization to colorization. Unfortunately, such texture segmentation is not easy since textures in manga are composed of lines and exhibit similar features to structural lines(contour lines). So currently, texture segmentation is still manually performed, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. To extract a texture region, various texture features have been proposed for measuring texture similarity, but precise boundaries cannot be achieved since boundary pixels exhibit different features from inner pixels. In this paper, we propose a novel method which also adopts texture features to estimate texture regions. Unlike existing methods, the estimated texture region is only regarded an initial, imprecise texture region. We expand the initial texture region to the precise boundary based on local smoothness via a graph-cut formulation. This allows our method to extract texture regions with precise boundaries. We have applied our method to various manga images and satisfactory results were achieved in all cases.