SketchKeyAnime: Reference-anchored Sparse Key-Sketch Animation Synthesis

Meixi Li; Xianlin Zhang; Yue Zhang; Xueming Li

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arXiv · 2606.19958

SketchKeyAnime: Reference-anchored Sparse Key-Sketch Animation Synthesis

Meixi Li·Xianlin Zhang·Yue Zhang·Xueming Li

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Abstract

Traditional animation production relies heavily on manual drawing and iterative refinement, particularly for key-pose design, in-betweening, and character coloring. While existing animation and video generation methods have made notable progress, they typically depend on RGB boundary frames, dense frame-wise conditions, or complete sketch sequences, limiting their applicability under low-cost input conditions. We present SketchKeyAnime, a video diffusion framework for generating structurally controllable, appearance-consistent, and temporally coherent animations from sparse key-sketch inputs. Given a single reference RGB image and a few temporally indexed key sketches, SketchKeyAnime introduces a dual-branch conditioning mechanism to encode local geometric constraints alongside semantic-temporal context. It leverages Sketch Cross Attention to fuse reference image and sketch conditions with learnable gating, and incorporates an Adaptive Weighted Loss to strengthen supervision on key-sketch frames and line-art regions. Experimental results on the Aesthetic subset of Sakuga-42M show that our approach consistently outperforms representative animation interpolation and sketch-guided generation baselines. Compared to the best-performing baseline, SketchKeyAnime reduces EDMD by 31.9\% and FVD by 9.5\%, demonstrating superior sketch fidelity and temporal coherence, while achieving the best overall performance across most quantitative metrics. These results validate the proposed framework and highlight its potential for low-cost, highly controllable animation creation.

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BibTeX RIS

Meixi Li, Xianlin Zhang, Yue Zhang, Xueming Li. 2026-06-18. SketchKeyAnime: Reference-anchored Sparse Key-Sketch Animation Synthesis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19958

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