Naver Webtoon Showcases AI Technology at 'Debut 2023'

Visitors are lining up at the Naver Webtoon booth at 'Debut 2023' held at COEX in Samseong-dong, Seoul.

Naver Webtoon has unveiled the demo version of its self-developed technology, ‘Webtooni’. Webtooni is a technology that can transform photos or videos into a webtoon art style in real time.

At ‘DEVIEW 2023’, Naver’s largest domestic developer conference held over two days from the 27th to 28th at COEX in Samseong-dong, Seoul, Naver Webtoon operated a session introducing the Webtooni project as well as an official booth.

The Webtooni project introduced by Naver Webtoon uses deep learning technology to convert images in real-life photos into webtoon characters and backgrounds. To reflect the characteristics of webtoon characters, which have various facial feature shapes, diverse preprocessing and postprocessing techniques based on computer graphics were applied.

Last year, a paper related to Webtooni was also accepted at the ‘Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR)’, a leading academic conference in the field of vision artificial intelligence (AI).

Webtooni is a technology designed to help users enjoy webtoons more. The very fact that it can transform a real person’s face, expressions, and movements directly into webtoon characters can make the reader’s webtoon viewing experience more enjoyable. It also enables the development of new content such as interactive webtoons where users can enter the webtoon and participate in the story.

At this conference, Naver Webtoon showcased an experience where users could transform into characters from popular Naver Webtoon works such as ‘True Beauty’, ‘Pali People’, ‘Imalnyeon Series’, ‘Return to Player’, and ‘Tiger Brother’ and take four-panel photos. On the morning of the 28th, developers responsible for Webtooni development held a presentation session detailing the development process of Webtooni.

Kim Daesik, AI Lead at Naver Webtoon, stated, “We plan to conduct various experiments using Webtooni in the future,” adding, “We will research innovative and fun technologies that benefit both users and creators to strengthen Naver Webtoon’s unique AI capabilities.”