Line Art Colorization With Concatenated Spatial Attention

Mingcheng Yuan, Edgar Simo-Serra; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2021, pp. 3946-3950

Line art plays a fundamental role in illustration and design, and allows for iteratively polishing designs. However, as they lack color, they can have issues in conveying final designs. In this work, we propose an interactive colorization approach based on a conditional generative adversarial network that takes both the line art and color hints as inputs to produce a high-quality colorized image. Our approach is based on a U-net architecture with a multi-discriminator framework. We propose a Concatenation and Spatial Attention module that is able to generate more consistent and higher quality of line art colorization from user given hints. We evaluate on a large-scale illustration dataset and comparison with existing approaches corroborate the effectiveness of our approach.