| Abstract: | Extracting balloons has been a challenge in digital comics, in particular for complex comic books. In fact, current algorithms are seemingly adequate for simple comics, but not for complex ones. This paper proposes an algorithm based on the Sobel operator plus a modified flood fill operator to identify and extract balloons in comic book pages. Unlike other approaches, our algorithm applies to any sort of comics, no matter they are simple or complex comics, without making any assumptions regarding the line continuity of the image, color depth of the image, orientation of the text, and language. Experimental results show that our algorithm significantly improves the rate of correctly detected balloons, and simultaneously decreases the number of false positives, when compared to other algorithms. |
