Keyframe generation from cartoon animation using rule-based optical flow

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel method to generate keyframes from cartoon animation with the aim to improve the details and accuracy of contents represented by keyframes. Consider that general techniques on video summarization usually drop some important contents due to its restriction on aspect ratio; this paper thus proposes a new method using panorama technology to add more details to be included in each keyframe. The concept is to mark the time code based on shot boundary and optical flow direction. The period of time between every two consecutive marked time codes is used to form a shot sequence which is actually a sequence of frames. The global and local optical flows are also used to determine how to select the frames and when to stitch the frames together according to the rules. The results of this proposed method are keyframes generated from various types of cartoon animation which are outstanding compared to their comic adaptations.