Exploiting Aliasing for Manga Restoration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a two-stage method that exploits aliasing artifacts caused by downsampling to restore high-quality bitonal manga images, improving resolution and screentone details.

Contribution

The novel approach leverages aliasing as a clue for resolution estimation and region-wise screentone restoration, advancing manga image enhancement techniques.

Findings

Effective resolution estimation via SE-Net.

Successful region-wise screentone restoration.

Quantitative and visual improvements demonstrated.

Abstract

As a popular entertainment art form, manga enriches the line drawings details with bitonal screentones. However, manga resources over the Internet usually show screentone artifacts because of inappropriate scanning/rescaling resolution. In this paper, we propose an innovative two-stage method to restore quality bitonal manga from degraded ones. Our key observation is that the aliasing induced by downsampling bitonal screentones can be utilized as informative clues to infer the original resolution and screentones. First, we predict the target resolution from the degraded manga via the Scale Estimation Network (SE-Net) with spatial voting scheme. Then, at the target resolution, we restore the region-wise bitonal screentones via the Manga Restoration Network (MR-Net) discriminatively, depending on the degradation degree. Specifically, the original screentones are directly restored in pattern-identifiable regions, and visually plausible screentones are synthesized in pattern-agnostic regions. Quantitative evaluation on synthetic data and visual assessment on real-world cases illustrate the effectiveness of our method.