Movie2Comics: Towards a Lively Video Content Presentation

As a type of artwork, comics is prevalent and popular around the world. However, despite the availability of assistive software and tools, the creation of comics is still a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. This paper proposes a scheme that is able to automatically turn a movie clip to comics. Two principles are followed in the scheme: 1) optimizing the information preservation of the movie; and 2) generating outputs following the rules and the styles of comics. The scheme mainly contains three components: script-face mapping, descriptive picture extraction, and cartoonization. The script-face mapping utilizes face tracking and recognition techniques to accomplish the mapping between characters' faces and their scripts. The descriptive picture extraction then generates a sequence of frames for presentation. Finally, the cartoonization is accomplished via three steps: panel scaling, stylization, and comics layout design. Experiments are conducted on a set of movie clips and the results have demonstrated the usefulness and the effectiveness of the scheme.