Manga Rescreening with Interpretable Screentone Representation
Minshan Xie Chengze Li Tien-Tsin Wong
The process of adapting or repurposing manga pages is a time-consuming task
that requires manga artists to manually work on every single screentone region
and apply new patterns to create novel screentones across multiple panels. To
address this issue, we propose an automatic manga rescreening pipeline that
aims to minimize the human effort involved in manga adaptation. Our pipeline
automatically recognizes screentone regions and generates novel screentones
with newly specified characteristics (e.g., intensity or type). Existing manga
generation methods have limitations in understanding and synthesizing complex
tone- or intensity-varying regions. To overcome these limitations, we propose a
novel interpretable representation of screentones that disentangles their
intensity and type features, enabling better recognition and synthesis of
screentones. This interpretable screentone representation reduces ambiguity in
recognizing intensity-varying regions and provides fine-grained controls during
screentone synthesis by decoupling and anchoring the type or the intensity
feature. Our proposed method is demonstrated to be effective and convenient
through various experiments, showcasing the superiority of the newly proposed
pipeline with the interpretable screentone representations.