Semi-automatic Text and Graphics Extraction of Manga Using Eye Tracking Information

The popularity of storing, distributing and reading comic books electronically has made the task of comics analysis an interesting research problem. Different work have been carried out aiming at understanding their layout structure and the graphic content. However the results are still far from universally applicable, largely due to the huge variety in expression styles and page arrangement, especially in manga (Japanese comics). In this paper, we propose a comic image analysis approach using eye-tracking data recorded during manga reading sessions. As humans are extremely capable of interpreting the structured drawing content, and show different reading behaviors based on the nature of the content, their eye movements follow distinguishable patterns over text or graphic regions. Therefore, eye gaze data can add rich information to the understanding of the manga content. Experimental results show that the fixations and saccades indeed form consistent patterns among readers, and can be used for manga textual and graphical analysis.