At an animation studio in Prague <br />researchers have made a breakthrough in updating classic, black & white hand-drawn cartoons to make them appeal to a generation of viewers brought up on a diet of 3D computer animation. They believe it will herald a new era in cartoon animation. <br /><br /> A new era in animation <br />The hope is based on software designed to automate the time-consuming painting of hand-drawn animations. The technology was developed for a range of drawing styles, as Daniel Sykora, a computer scientist at the Czech Technical University in Prague and coordinator of the Cartoon Scientist project explains: <br /><br /> “We had to develop some new algorithms to find the proper boundaries of the (drawing) regions, so that the user just has to provide some indications about where those regions are and the algorithms find these boundaries automatically” <br /><br /> Scientists at this EU-supported research project realised that the same software could be used not only to restore old animations, but also
