ToonComposer: Generative Post-Keyframing for Cartoon Production - Paper Overview

The research introduces ToonComposer, a novel generative model designed to streamline cartoon production by unifying the traditionally separate and labor-intensive stages of inbetweening and colorization into a single "post-keyframing" process. This system utilizes sparse keyframe sketches and a single colored reference frame to generate high-quality, stylistically consistent cartoon videos, significantly reducing manual effort for artists. ToonComposer achieves this through a sparse sketch injection mechanism for precise control and a Spatial Low-Rank Adapter (SLRA) for efficiently adapting modern video foundation models to the cartoon domain while preserving their temporal coherence. The paper also presents PKBench, a new benchmark with human-drawn sketches for evaluating the model's performance in real-world scenarios, demonstrating superior visual quality, motion consistency, and production efficiency compared to existing AI-assisted methods.