An active contour model for speech balloon detection in comics

Comic books constitute an important cultural heritage asset in many countries. Digitization combined with subsequent comic book understanding would enable a variety of new applications, including content-based retrieval and content re-targeting. Document understanding in this domain is challenging as comics are semi-structured documents, combining semantically important graphical and textual parts. Few studies have been done in this direction. In this work we detail a novel approach for closed and non-closed speech balloon localization in scanned comic book pages, an essential step towards a fully automatic comic book understanding. The approach is compared with existing methods for closed balloon localization found in the literature and results are presented.