Synthesis of Screentone Patterns of Manga Characters

Manga or Japanese comics are a popular medium and their images comprise line drawings and screentones. This study investigates the screentone synthesis task that involves translation from line drawings to manga images. Screentones have regular patterns that are difficult to synthesize. To address this problem, we propose a method to translate line drawings into manga images by generating pixel-wise screentone class labels instead of generating manga images directly. To train a screentone label generator, we create paired data of line drawings and pixel-wise screentone class labels that we obtain by applying to manga images a screentone removal and a screentone classifier, respectively. We train the screentone classifier using paired data of simulated manga images and pixel-wise screentone class labels. In tests, we conduct post-processing to reduce noise in the generated pixel-wise screentone labels. Experiments show that our proposed method produces reasonable screentone patterns. In comparison with results obtained using a baseline method of image-to-image translations, our results are comparable or more visually appealing.