Feature- and region-based auto painting for 2D animation

This paper presents a novel approach to automating the entire coloring process in traditional cel animation production. A feature-based region-matching algorithm is proposed. It first matches a set of master frames to construct correspondences between regions in the master frames and extract a stable topology. The first frame of each scene is then colored based on the set of master frames. With the painted first frame and established stable topology, each region in subsequent frames is matched with regions in the previous frames and colored. Compared with other algorithms, our approach is able to handle bigger changes between frames and automatically color the first frame of each sequence.