Panel and Speech Balloon Extraction from Comic Books

Comic books represent an important cultural heritage in many countries. However, few researches have been done in order to analyse the content of comics such as panels, speech balloons or characters. At first glance, the structure of a comic page may appear easy to determine. In practice, the configuration of the page, the size and the shape of the panels can be different from one page to the next. Moreover, authors often draw extended contents (speech balloon or comic art) that overlap two panels or more. In some situations, the panel extraction can become a real challenge. Speech balloons are other important elements of comics. Full text indexing is only possible if the text can be extracted. However the text is usually embedded among graphic elements. Moreover, unlike newspapers, the text layout in speech balloons can be irregular. Classic text extraction method can fail. We propose, in this paper, a method based on region growing and mathematical morphology to extract automatically the panels of a comic page and a method to detect speech balloons. Our approach is compared with other methods find in the literature. Results are presented and discussed.