Comic Image Normalization using the gradient Radon Transform based on OpenCL implementation

Digital comic images are one of popular contents on the Internet. Usually, they are scanned from comic books by digital scanners. Without post-processing, they may have different sizes, skews and margins other than contents at the boundary. To normalize the size of their contents without the skews and margins is an important step in comic image analysis and application such as content-based comic image retrieval system. In this paper, we propose a method to detect a box frame in comic images by extracting of line segments using the gradient Radon transform. The box frame in comic images is the maximum rectangle which consists of contents without margins. We use the detected box frame to normalize the size of comic images and to make them no skew. In addition, the proposed method is implemented by OpenCL to speed up the detection of the line segments. Experimental results show that our proposed method effectively detects the box frame in comic images.