GCN-Based Multi-Modal Multi-Label Attribute Classification in Anime Illustration Using Domain-Specific Semantic Features

This paper presents a multi-modal multi-label attribute classification model in anime illustration based on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) using domain-specific semantic features. In animation production, since creators often intentionally highlight the subtle characteristics of the characters and objects when creating anime illustrations, we focus on the task of multi-label attribute classification. To capture the relationship between attributes, we construct a multi-modal GCN model that can adopt semantic features specific to anime illustration. To generate the domain-specific semantic features that represent the semantic contents of anime illustrations, we construct a new captioning framework for anime illustration by combining real images and their style transformation. The contributions of the proposed method are two-folds. 1) More comprehensive relationships between attributes are captured by introducing GCN with semantic features into the multi-label attribute classification task of anime illustrations. 2) More accurate image captioning of anime illustrations can be generated by a trainable model by using only real-world images. To our best knowledge, this is the first work dealing with multi-label attribute classification in anime illustration. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing it with some existing methods including the state-of-the-art methods.