Automatic text localisation in scanned comic books

Christophe Rigaud (1) , Dimosthenis Karatzas (2) , Joost van de Weijer (2) , Jean-Christophe Burie (1) , Jean-Marc Ogier (1)

1 L3I - Laboratoire Informatique, Image et Interaction - EA 2118
2 CVC

Comic books constitute an important cultural heritage asset in many countries. Digitization combined with subsequent document understanding enable direct content-based search as opposed to metadata only search (e.g. album title or author name). Few studies have been done in this direction. In this work we detail a novel approach for the automatic text localization in scanned comics book pages, an essential step towards a fully automatic comics book understanding. We focus on speech text as it is semantically important and represents the majority of the text present in comics. The approach is compared with existing methods of text localization found in the literature and results are presented.

Mots clés: Text localization; comics; text/graphic separation; complex background; unstructured document

Domaines: Traitement des images [eess.IV]

Christophe Rigaud, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Joost van de Weijer, Jean-Christophe Burie, Jean-Marc Ogier. Automatic text localisation in scanned comic books. 9th International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications, Feb 2013, Barcelona, Spain. ⟨hal-00841492⟩