Decorative line and edge extraction in cartoon images

Abstract

Decorative Lines and edges in a cartoon image are the most important elements to convey its semantic information. In this study, we propose a method to extract both decorative lines and edges of the cartoon image at the same time. Firstly, we use the Hessian matrix to compute the direction perpendicular to the decorative lines in the image. Then, non-maximum suppression is applied to the image's second derivative of Gaussian to locate the possible decorative line's center. Secondly, we use directional zero-crossing (the zero-crossing of the first Gaussian derivative on the precomputed direction) to verify the existence of the decorative lines. Finally, decorative lines and the edges detected by non-maximum suppression on the first Gaussian derivative are fused together. The experimental results show that our method is more effective than other existed methods in literature for complicated cartoon images. © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2013.