Comic storyboard extraction via edge segment analysis

Abstract

Comic storyboard extraction aims to decompose the comic image into several storyboards (or frames), which is the key technique to produce the digital comic documents suitable for mobile reading. Previous methods fail either to detect overlapped storyboards or to produce storyboards without blank margins. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel comic storyboard extraction method based on edge segment analysis. First, we extract edge segments (i.e. contiguous chains of Canny edge points) from the input comic image; second, we detect line segments within each obtained edge segment with a top-down scheme; third, we detect storyboards through line segments combination and storyboard validation, and perform post-processing to handle some special cases. We test the proposed method on two datasets comprising 2237 comic pages from 11 printed comic series. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves satisfactory results and outperformed the existing methods on the storyboard and page level.