Western color comics and Japanese-style screened manga are two popular comic styles. They mainly differ in the style of region-filling. However, the conversion between the two region-filling styles is very challenging, and manually done currently. In this paper, we identify that the major obstacle in the conversion between the two filling styles stems from the difference between the fundamental properties of screened region-filling and colored region-filling. To resolve this obstacle, we propose a screentone variational autoencoder, ScreenVAE, to map the screened manga to an intermediate domain. This intermediate domain can summarize local texture characteristics and is interpolative. With this domain, we effectively unify the properties of screening and color-filling, and ease the learning for bidirectional translation between screened manga and color comics. To carry out the bidirectional translation, we further propose a network to learn the translation between the intermediate domain and color comics. Our model can generate quality screened manga given a color comic, and generate color comic that retains the original screening intention by the bitonal manga artist. Several results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness and convenience of the proposed method. We also demonstrate how the intermediate domain can assist other applications such as manga inpainting and photo-to-comic conversion.

中文翻译：

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使用网屏变分自动编码器进行漫画填充风格转换

西方彩色漫画和日式漫画是两种流行的漫画风格。它们主要在区域填充的风格上有所不同。然而，两种区域填充样式之间的转换非常具有挑战性，目前是手动完成的。在本文中，我们确定了两种填充样式转换的主要障碍源于屏蔽区域填充和彩色区域填充的基本属性之间的差异。为了解决这个障碍，我们提出了一种网屏变分自动编码器 ScreenVAE，将经过筛选的漫画映射到中间域。这个中间域可以概括局部纹理特征并且是插值的。有了这个域，我们有效地统一了加网和填色的属性，并简化筛选漫画和彩色漫画之间双向翻译的学习。为了进行双向翻译，我们进一步提出了一个网络来学习中间域和彩色漫画之间的翻译。我们的模型可以在给定彩色漫画的情况下生成高质量的筛选漫画，并生成保留了双色漫画艺术家原始筛选意图的彩色漫画。几个结果证明了所提出方法的有效性和便利性。我们还演示了中间域如何帮助其他应用程序，例如漫画修复和照片到漫画的转换。我们的模型可以在给定彩色漫画的情况下生成高质量的筛选漫画，并生成保留了双色漫画艺术家原始筛选意图的彩色漫画。几个结果证明了所提出方法的有效性和便利性。我们还演示了中间域如何帮助其他应用程序，例如漫画修复和照片到漫画的转换。我们的模型可以在给定彩色漫画的情况下生成高质量的筛选漫画，并生成保留了双色漫画艺术家原始筛选意图的彩色漫画。几个结果证明了所提出方法的有效性和便利性。我们还演示了中间域如何帮助其他应用程序，例如漫画修复和照片到漫画的转换。