Automatic comic page segmentation based on polygon detection

Abstract

Comic page segmentation aims to automatically decompose scanned comic images into storyboards (frames), which is the key technique to produce digital comic documents that are suitable for reading on mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a novel method for comic page segmentation by finding the quadrilateral enclosing box of each storyboard. We first acquire the edge image of the input comic image, and then extract line segments with a heuristic line segment detection algorithm. We perform line clustering to further merge the overlapped line segments and remove the redundancy line segments. Finally, we perform another round of line clustering and post-processing to compose the obtained line segments into complete quadrilateral enclosing boxes of the storyboards. The proposed method is tested on 2,237 comic images from 12 different printed comic series, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method is effective for comic image segmentation and outperforms the existing methods.