NAVER : WEBTOON Launches AI-Powered Automatic Colorization Service, Supporting Creators through Technological Innovation

WEBTOON Launches AI-Powered Automatic Colorization Service, Supporting Creators through Technological Innovation

- 'WEBTOON AI Painter' can understand the context of the sketch to recognize the areas to paint, improving creators' work efficiency

- NAVER's deep learning technology used more than 300,000 Webtoon images to provide the service optimized for digital comics

- NAVER to present a technical paper about the automatic coloring technology at the globally renowned conference WACV 2022

2021-10-27

Global storytech platform WEBTOON today launched the beta service 'WEBTOON AI Painter' for digital comic creators. The AI-powered automatic colorization service can understand the context of drawings and accurately paints the colors accordingly, improving creators' workflow efficiency.

WEBTOON AI Painter identifies elements of an image and automatically paints when the creator selects the desired color and visual target on a drawing. This allows creators can complete the painting with fewer touches compared to manually adding colors.

This newly launched service is the result of three years of research and development by WEBTOON. More than 300,000 datasets, including Webtoon images, were used in NAVER's deep learning technology to study coloring styles and image elements, such as face, body and background. The service also enables the drawing lines of sketches to be cleaner and sharper while maintaining the creator's characteristic style.

WEBTOON AI Painter includes features that enable smoother and easier post-editing, such as exporting a PDS file with layers and at the highest quality to keep the original resolution.

WEBTOON will actively collect users' opinions during the beta test period to further enhance and add more features to the service so that it can support more diverse works by creators. WEBTOON plans to open beta test the updated service for global users afterward.

A technical paper about technologies used in WEBTOON AI Painter has been accepted at the world's premier conference IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2022, and will be presented there in January.

WEBTOON is continuously investing in technologies to expand the digital comics platform's capabilities. It launched the open self-publishing platform CANVAS for amateur creators, Page Profit Share (PPS) program and global service expansion. WEBTOON plans to launch additional creator services, such as automatic background or character generators, by further advancing supporting technologies.

"Through continuous investment in technologies, we expect to provide a platform where webtoon creators can focus on creating better stories and producing high-quality content by having supporting tools to enhance workflow efficiency," said Choong-hyun Seo, the leader of NAVER WEBTOON AI Creation. "As a global storytech company with innovative technologies, WEBTOON will keep working on expanding the global digital comic industry and supporting the creator community."

[Reference image]

1) GIF showing basic coloring using 'WEBTOON AI Painter'

2) GIF showing foreground segmentation mode - WEBTOON AI Painter automatically split the image into foreground and background before coloring.