Video Codec for Classical Cartoon Animations
With Hardware Accelerated Playback

Abstract We introduce a novel approach to video compression which is suitable for traditional outline-based cartoon animations. In this case the dynamic foreground consists of several homogeneous regions and the background is static textural image. For this drawing style we show how to recover hybrid representation where the background is stored as a single bitmap and the foreground as a sequence of vector images. This allows us to preserve compelling visual quality as well as spatial scalability even for low encoding bit-rates. We also introduce an efficient approach to play back compressed animations in real-time on commodity graphics hardware. Practical results confirm that for the same storage requirements our framework provides better visual quality as compared to standard video compression techniques.

Supplementary material You can download supplementary material. Archive contains simple Win32 OpenGL-based player that allows you to decode and display short testing sequences encoded using our novel codec. To see the best possible visual quality, graphics card with FSAA (Full Screen Anti-Aliasing) support is required. Reference DivX version encoded at comparable bit-rate is also included. Comparison Detail views from several testing sequences: (original resolution: 720x576, frame rate: 25 fps, encoding bit-rate: 256kbps)

DivX Sýkora et al. original	DivX Sýkora et al. original

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