APISR: Anime Production Inspired Real-World Anime Super-Resolution

While real-world anime super-resolution (SR) has gained increasing attention in the SR community, most existing methods still adopt techniques from the photo-realistic domain. In this paper, we analyze the anime production workflow and rethink how to use characteristics of it for the sake of the real-world anime SR. First, we argue that video networks and datasets are not necessary for anime SR due to the repetition use of hand-drawing frames. Instead, we propose an anime image collection pipeline by choosing the least compressed and the most informative frames from the video sources. Based on this pipeline, we introduce the Anime Production-oriented Image (API) dataset. In addition, we identify two anime-specific challenges of distorted and faint hand-drawn lines and unwanted color artifacts. We address the first issue by introducing a prediction-oriented compression module in the image degradation model and a pseudo-ground truth with enhanced hand-drawn lines. In addition, we introduce the balanced twin perceptual loss combining both anime and photo-realistic high-level features to mitigate unwanted color artifacts and increase visual clarity. We evaluate our method through extensive experiments on the public benchmark, showing our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin. We will release code, models, and dataset upon acceptance.