A Survey of Comics Research in Computer Science

Abstract

Graphical novels such as comics and mangas are well known all over the world. The digital transition started to change the way people are reading comics, more and more on smartphones and tablets and less and less on paper. In the recent years, a wide variety of research about comics has been proposed and might change the way comics are created, distributed and read in future years. Early work focuses on low level document image analysis: indeed comic books are complex, they contains text, drawings, balloon, panels, onomatopoeia, etc. Different fields of computer science covered research about user interaction and content generation such as multimedia, artificial intelligence, humancomputer interaction, etc. with different sets of values. We propose in this paper to review the previous research about comics in computer science, to state what have been done and to give some insights about the main outlooks.

Editors’ Introduction and Review: Visual Narrative Research: An Emerging Field in Cognitive Science

“…We believe our proposed framework makes the case that this is warranted. Several emerging theories of visual narrative processing range in the extent to which they accomplish this agenda, spanning fields of psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience (Cohn, , ), scene perception and event cognition (Loschky et al, ), attention (Smith, ), developmental psychology (Nakazawa, ), multimodal discourse (Bateman & Wildfeuer, ), and computer science (Augereau, Iwata, & Kise, ), among others. However, we have intentionally not discussed these theories herein.…”

Extraction and Analysis of Fictional Character Networks

“…The fact that a pattern appears frequently in the narrative is also used as a hint to distinguish characters from other objects [107]. More recent articles focus on training Deep Neural Networks [54], but there is not enough publicly annotated data yet to reach the full potential of such approaches [13]. Finally, it is worth noticing that before being applied, many face detection approaches require some preprocessing, in particular detecting panel bounds and speech bubbles [54], which in turn constitute specific problems [201,234].…”

“…However, this requires efficiently solving certain lower-level problems, in particular panel identification and panel ordering. Existing methods to detect the boundaries of panels take advantage of the black lines generally outlining them, or of the white space called gutter separating them [13,234]. But a number of artists use complex page layouts, which makes both panel detection and ordering much harder: overlapping panels, panels joined by other objects (speech bubbles, caption) partly open panels, or even panels with no explicit boundary [234].…”

“…Comics. We could not find any article dealing with the extraction of conversational networks from comics, mainly because this requires solving a number of lower-level problems for which there are not much literature [201] and no efficient solutions yet [13]. The first ones are panel detection and ordering, already mentioned in Section 4.1.1.…”

Digital Comics Image Indexing Based on Deep Learning

“…To access digital comics in an accurate and user-friendly experience on all mediums such as smartphones, tablets, 3D books and computer's screens, it is necessary to extract and identify comic book elements [13]. Accordingly, the relations between these elements could be investigated further to assist the understanding of the digital form of comic books by a computer.…”