CINETOON: A Semi-automated System for Rendering Black/White Comic Books from Video Streams

In this paper we propose CINETOON, a semi-automated system which can generate black/white comic books from a sequence of video streams obtained from cinemas. CINETOON provides an intuitive interface to render comics. Our system consists of four major components : Key Frame Extractor, Image-based Comic Cut Converter, Background Effect Stylizer and Comic Elements Renderer. First, to capture the frame image from the video stream, we generate a workspace file which includes the frame images and script files. Second, the comic converter is decoupled into two processes: image binarization and stroke extraction. We introduce one novel black/white binarization algorithm for the frame images. Third, in order to segment foreground object, we propose a simple and straightforward algorithm implemented in the background effect stylizer. Also CINETOON provides some classes of shape-controllable icons such as word balloon, stylized fonts, speed line and specialized icons. The comic pages produced by our system show that CINETOON was so successful to make a comic book from a well-known cinema in a reasonable time and manual intervention.