Manga layout is a core component in manga production, characterized
by its unique styles. However, stylistic manga layouts are
difficult for novices to produce as it requires hands-on experience
and domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose an approach
to automatically generate a stylistic manga layout from a set of
input artworks with user-specified semantics, thus allowing less-experienced
users to create high-quality manga layouts with minimal
efforts. We first introduce three parametric style models that
encode the unique stylistic aspects of manga layouts, including layout
structure, panel importance, and panel shape. Next, we propose
a two-stage approach to generate a manga layout: 1) an initial
layout is created that best fits the input artworks and layout structure
model, according to a generative probabilistic framework; 2)
the layout and artwork geometries are jointly refined using an efficient
optimization procedure, resulting in a professional-looking
manga layout. Through a user study, we demonstrate that our approach
enables novice users to easily and quickly produce higher-quality
layouts that exhibit realistic manga styles, when compared
to a commercially-available manual layout tool.
@article{Cao2012,
author = {Y. Cao and A. B. Chan and R. Lau},
title = {Automatic Stylistic Manga Layout},
journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH Asia 2012)},
volume = {31},
issue = {6},
year = {2012}
}