A Robust Panel Extraction Method for Manga

Abstract

Automatically extracting frames/panels from digital comic pages is crucial for techniques that facilitate comic reading on mobile devices with limited display areas. However, automatic panel extraction for manga, i.e., Japanese comics, can be especially challenging, largely because of its complex panel layout design mixed with various visual symbols throughout the page. In this paper, we propose a robust method for automatically extracting panels from digital manga pages. Our method first extracts the panel block by closing open panels and identifying a page background mask. It then performs a recursive binary splitting to partition the panel block into a set of sub-blocks, where an optimal splitting line at each recursive level is determined adaptively.