Research On The Reuse Of Two-dimensional Cartoon Character Motion

Two-dimensional cartoon is very popular nowadays for its rich expressiveness and special style. It is also widely applied in many areas, such as advertisement, education, and entertainment. So far, a large amount of two-dimensional cartoons have been created. The creation of two-dimensional cartoon is a both complex and time-consuming job. Effective reuse of existing cartoons can reduce work load of animators, therefore improving the efficiency of cartoon creation.This paper focuses on how to reuse character motion in two-dimensional cartoon, and accordingly proposes an interactive cartoon motion capture and retargeting technique. This technique mainly consists of three steps.First, a character pose sequence is extracted from given cartoon sequence. We propose an extraction method by support vector machines (SVM). This method converts character pose extraction into a two-class classification problem by SVM.Second, the deformation of every part of the character undergoes in the motion is captured from the extracted pose sequence. We propose a key-frame-based cartoon motion capture method. With the contours marked by user in key frames, the contours of every part in intermediate frames can be located automatically. Based on the contour sequence of each part, the deformation data of each part can be obtained.Finally, the obtained part deformation is applied to a new cartoon character to generate a new cartoon sequence. First, the part correspondence between the new character and the original character is built. Then, the obtained deformation data is applied to the corresponding parts of the new character.The experiments demonstrate that the proposed interactive cartoon motion capture and retargeting technique can generate a style-similar motion of a new character from existing character motion with a few of user efforts.