Text-independent speech balloon segmentation for comics and manga

Segmentation des bulles de bandes dessinées et manga indépendante du texte

Christophe Rigaud (1) , Jean-Christophe Burie (1) , Jean-Marc Ogier (1)

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

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 character, they inform the reader about speech tone and the position of its speaker. We present a generic and text-independent segmentation method based on topological and spatial organization of connected component .

Mots clés: graphic recognition; speech balloon; comics image analysis; manga image analysis

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

Christophe Rigaud, Jean-Christophe Burie, Jean-Marc Ogier. Text-independent speech balloon segmentation for comics and manga. Graphic Recognition. Current Trends and Challenges 11th International Workshop, GREC 2015, Nancy, France, August 22–23, 2015, Revised Selected Papers, 2017. ⟨hal-01719513⟩