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Semantic Segmentation for Line Drawing Vectorization Using Neural Networks
Author(s) -
Kim Byungsoo,
Wang Oliver,
Öztireli A. Cengiz,
Gross Markus
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/cgf.13365
Subject(s) - computer science , raster graphics , vectorization (mathematics) , artificial intelligence , context (archaeology) , segmentation , set (abstract data type) , image segmentation , line (geometry) , semantics (computer science) , intersection (aeronautics) , pattern recognition (psychology) , image (mathematics) , computer vision , mathematics , paleontology , geometry , parallel computing , engineering , biology , programming language , aerospace engineering
Abstract In this work, we present a method to vectorize raster images of line art. Inverting the rasterization procedure is inherently ill‐conditioned, as there exist many possible vector images that could yield the same raster image. However, not all of these vector images are equally useful to the user, especially if performing further edits is desired. We therefore define the problem of computing an instance segmentation of the most likely set of paths that could have created the raster image. Once the segmentation is computed, we use existing vectorization approaches to vectorize each path, and then combine all paths into the final output vector image. To determine which set of paths is most likely, we train a pair of neural networks to provide semantic clues that help resolve ambiguities at intersection and overlap regions. These predictions are made considering the full context of the image, and are then globally combined by solving a Markov Random Field (MRF). We demonstrate the flexibility of our method by generating results on character datasets, a synthetic random line dataset, and a dataset composed of human drawn sketches. For all cases, our system accurately recovers paths that adhere to the semantics of the drawings.