Abstract
Comics and manga are one of the most popular and familiar forms of graphic content over the world and play a major role in spreading country’s culture. Nowadays, massive digitization and digital-born materials allow page-per-page mobile reading but we believe that other usages may be released in the near future. In this paper, we focus on speech balloon segmentation which is a key issue for text/graphic association in scanned and digital-born comic book images. Speech balloons are at the interface between text and comic characters, they inform the reader about speech tone and the position of the speakers. We present a generic and text-independent speech balloon segmentation method based on color, shape and topological organization of the connected-components. The method has been evaluated at pixel-level on two public datasets (eBDtheque and Manga109) and the F-measure results are 78.24% and 80.04% respectively.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Milton Griepp’s White Paper, ICv2 Conference 2014.
- 2.
- 3.
References
Arai, K., Tolle, H.: Method for real time text extraction of digital manga comic. Int. J. Image Process. (IJIP) 4(6), 669–676 (2011)
Bigorda, L.G., Karatzas, D.: A fast hierarchical method for multi-script and arbitrary oriented scene text extraction. CoRR abs/1407.7504 (2014). http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.7504
Chalmeta, R., Hurtado, F., Sacristn, V., Saumell, M.: Measuring regularity of convex polygons. Comput. Aided Des. 45(2), 93–104 (2013). http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010448512001650. Solid and Physical Modeling 2012
Cyb: Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels, pp. 128–153. William Morrow Paperbacks (2006)
Donoser, M., Bischof, H.: Efficient maximally stable extremal region (MSER) tracking. In: 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, vol. 1, pp. 553–560. IEEE (2006)
Everingham, M., Van Gool, L., Williams, C.K., Winn, J., Zisserman, A.: The pascal visual object classes (VOC) challenge. Int. J. Comput. Vision 88(2), 303–338 (2010)
Guérin, C., Rigaud, C., Mercier, A., et al.: eBDtheque: a representative database of comics. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), pp. 1145–1149. Washington DC (2013)
Ho, A.K.N., Burie, J.C., Ogier, J.M.: Panel and speech balloon extraction from comic books. In: 10th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems, pp. 424–428, March 2012
Lamiroy, B., Ogier, J.M.: Analysis and interpretation of graphical documents. In: Doermann, D., Tombre, K. (eds.) Handbook of Document Image Processing and Recognition. Springer, London (2014). doi:10.1007/978-0-85729-859-1_19
Li, L., Wang, Y., Suen, C.Y., Tang, Z., Liu, D.: A tree conditional random field model for panel detection in comic images. Pattern Recogn. 48(7), 2129–2140 (2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2015.01.011
Liu, X., Wang, Y., Tang, Z.: A clump splitting based method to localize speech balloons in comics. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), pp. 901–906. IEEE (2015)
Liu, X., Li, C., Zhu, H., Wong, T.T., Xu, X.: Text-aware balloon extraction from manga. Vis. Comput. 32(4), 501–511 (2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00371-015-1084-0
Matsui, Y., Ito, K., Aramaki, Y., Yamasaki, T., Aizawa, K.: Sketch-based manga retrieval using manga109 dataset. CoRR abs/1510.04389 (2015). http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.04389
Rigaud, C., Guérin, C., Karatzas, D., Burie, J.C., Ogier, J.M.: Knowledge-driven understanding of images in comic books. Int. J. Doc. Anal. Recogn. (IJDAR) 18(3), 199–221 (2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10032-015-0243-1
Rigaud, C., Karatzas, D., Burie, J.-C., Ogier, J.-M.: Adaptive contour classification of comics speech balloons. In: Lamiroy, B., Ogier, J.-M. (eds.) GREC 2013. LNCS, vol. 8746, pp. 53–62. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). doi:10.1007/978-3-662-44854-0_5
Rigaud, C., Karatzas, D., Van de Weijer, J., Burie, J.C., Ogier, J.M.: An active contour model for speech balloon detection in comics. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), pp. 1240–1244. IEEE (2013)
Rigaud, C., Karatzas, D., Van de Weijer, J., Burie, J.C., Ogier, J.M.: Automatic text localisation in scanned comic books. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP). SCITEPRESS Digital Library (2013)
Rigaud, C., Le Thanh, N., Burie, J.C., Ogier, J.M., Iwata, M., Imazu, E., Koichi, K.: Speech balloon and speaker association for comics and manga understanding. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), pp. 351–356. IEEE (2015)
Roudier, N.: Les terres creusées, volume Acte sur BD, Actes Sud (2011)
Stommel, M., Merhej, L.I., Müller, M.G.: Segmentation-free detection of comic panels. In: Bolc, L., Tadeusiewicz, R., Chmielewski, L.J., Wojciechowski, K. (eds.) ICCVG 2012. LNCS, vol. 7594, pp. 633–640. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-33564-8_76
Suzuki, S., et al.: Topological structural analysis of digitized binary images by border following. Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process. 30(1), 32–46 (1985)
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the University of La Rochelle (France), the town of La Rochelle and the PIA-iiBD (“Programme d’Investissements d’Avenir”). We are grateful to all authors and publishers of comics and manga images from eBDtheque and Manga109 datasets for allowing us to use their works.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rigaud, C., Burie, JC., Ogier, JM. (2017). Text-Independent Speech Balloon Segmentation for Comics and Manga. In: Lamiroy, B., Dueire Lins, R. (eds) Graphic Recognition. Current Trends and Challenges. GREC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9657. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52159-6_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52159-6_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-52158-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-52159-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)