Comic image understanding aims to automatically decompose scanned comic page images into storyboards and then identify the reading order of them, which is the key technique to produce digital comic documents that are suitable for reading on mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a novel comic image understanding method based on polygon detection. First, we segment a comic page images into storyboards by finding the polygonal enclosing box of each storyboard. Then, each storyboard can be represented by a polygon, and the reading order of them is determined by analyzing the relative geometric relationship between each pair of polygons. The proposed method is tested on 2000 comic images from ten printed comic series, and the experimental results demonstrate that it works well on different types of comic images.

Date Published: 4 February 2013
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 8658, Document Recognition and Retrieval XX, 86580B (4 February 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2003550

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8658:
Document Recognition and Retrieval XX
Richard Zanibbi; Bertrand Coüasnon, Editor(s)