Extraction of Frame Sequences in the Manga Context

Abstract

Manga are one of the most popular forms of comics consumed on a global level. Unfortunately, this kind of media was not designed for digital consumption, and consequently its format does not fit well into small areas, such as smartphone screens. In order to cope with this issue, in this paper we propose a novel approach to comics segmentation and sequencing by taking advantage of existing machine learning concepts which are used to generate an artificial intelligence (AI) capable of correctly detecting panels within an image. The regions proposed by the AI are then used to generate a grid that acts as anchor points for a mobile application guiding the reader during navigation and enabling full Manga responsiveness. The developed approach achieves overall better performances in terms of precision and recall, as well as higher fault tolerance than state-of-the-art approaches. The reliability of this method is also considered largely satisfactory for real-world scenarios, so that we are about to finalize an app implementing the method to be spread soon; additionally, future work will be devoted to generalize our approach to all the comics formats.