Automatic panel extraction of color comic images

Abstract

In this paper, an automatic approach for detecting and extracting panels in a color comic image is proposed. Panel extraction is challenging because the background color, the background pixel locations, the panel shapes and the panel layout are not known in advance. In our approach, uniform color stripes are first identified and used as separators to segment the color comic page image into sub-regions in a recursive manner. Panels are recognized as the sub-regions that cannot be further segmented. The structure of the panels is thus obtained in the extraction process and it contains the layout of the panels as well as the reading order. Panel extraction is useful because: 1) the extracted panels can be better fitted into a handheld device for viewing; and 2) the panels can then be further analyzed to extract features used for content based indexing and retrieval. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.