From drawing to animation-ready vector graphics

We present an automatic method to build a layered vector graphics structure ready for animation from a clean-line vector drawing of an organic, smooth shape. Inspiring from 3D segmentation methods, we introduce a new metric computed on the medial axis of a region to identify and quantify the visual salience of a sub-region relative to the rest. This enables us to recursively separate each region into two closed sub-regions at the location of the most salient junction. The resulting structure, layered in depth, can be used to pose and animate the drawing using a regular 2D skeleton.