Abstract
We introduce a method for automated conversion of scanned color comic
books and graphical novels into a new high-fidelity rescalable digital representation.
Since crisp black line artwork and lettering are the most important structural and stylistic elements
in this important genre of color illustrations, our digitization process is geared towards faithful
reconstruction of these elements.
This is a challenging task, because commercial presses perform halftoning (screening)
to approximate continuous tones and colors with overlapping grids of dots. Although
a large number of inverse haftoning (descreening) methods exist, they typically blur the intricate
black artwork. Our approach is specifically designed to descreen color comics, which
typically reproduce color using screened CMY inks, but print the black artwork using non-screened
solid black ink. After separating the scanned image into three screening grids,
one for each of the CMY process inks, we use non-linear optimization to fit a parametric
model describing each grid, and simultaneously recover the non-screened
black ink layer, which is then vectorized. The result of this process is a high
quality, compact, and rescalable digital representation of the original artwork.
@article{Kopf2012,
author = {Johannes Kopf and Dani Lischinski},
title = {Digital Reconstruction of Halftoned Color Comics},
journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia 2012)},
year = {2012},
volume = {31},
number = {6},
month = {Nov.},
pages = {to appear},
}
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