“We-Toon: A Communication Support System between Writers and Artists in Collaborative Webtoon Sketch Revision”, 2022-10 ():
[supplemental video] We present a communication support system, namely We-toon, that can bridge the webtoon writers and artists during sketch revision (ie. character design and draft revision). In the highly iterative design process between the webtoon writers and artists, writers often have difficulties in precisely articulating their feedback on sketches owing to their lack of drawing proficiency. This drawback makes the writers rely on textual descriptions and reference images found using search engines, leading to indirect and inefficient communications.
Inspired by a formative study, we designed We-toon to help writers revise webtoon sketches and effectively communicate with artists.
Through a GAN-based image synthesis and manipulation, We-toon can interactively generate diverse reference images and synthesize them locally on any user-provided image.
Our user study with 24 professional webtoon authors demonstrated that We-toon outperforms the traditional methods in terms of communication effectiveness and the writers’ satisfaction level related to the revised image.
[Keywords: webtoon, collaboration, communication, human-centered ai, creativity support, interactive system, user interface, GAN, interview, usability study]
…Training GANs: We-toon employs two GAN models, viz. (1) StyleGAN2-Ada for the image generation and perturbation, and (2) StyleMapGAN for synthesizing the source and reference images. In addition, We-toon applies one algorithm, viz. SeFa32 for fine-tuning (ie. the 5 sliders for fine-tuning an image).
Dataset: To train the models, we built a webtoon image corpus consisting of 47,233 256×256px face images. We did not use existing cartoon datasets[6, 7] since they mostly consisted of images from the Japanese cartoons (ie. manga) that have different visual characteristics from the webtoons.
To create a high-quality face dataset, we selected 441 romance or drama webtoons from Naver Webtoon, which is one of the largest webtoon service platforms in the world. From the raw images, we extracted the face images using Anime Face Detector, which is developed based on a faster-rcnn model. After filtering out the non-face images using the face detector, the dataset was further refined manually.