An active contour model for speech balloon detection in comics

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

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 comic book understanding would enable a variety of new applications, including content-based retrieval and content retargeting. Document understanding in this domain is challenging as comics are semi-structured documents, combining semantically important graphical and textual parts. Few studies have been done in this direction. In this work we detail a novel approach for closed and non-closed speech balloon localization in scanned comic book pages, an essential step towards a fully automatic comic book understanding. The approach is compared with existing methods for closed balloon localization found in the literature and results are presented.

Domaines: Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Christophe Rigaud, Jean-Christophe Burie, Jean-Marc Ogier, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Joost van de Weijer. An active contour model for speech balloon detection in comics. 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, Aug 2013, Washington, DC, USA, United States. pp.1240 - 1244. ⟨hal-00879816⟩