Abstract: Les auteurs proposent une méthode de localisation des personnages dans des cases de bandes dessinées en s'appuyant sur les caractéristiques des bulles de dialogue. L'évaluation montre un taux de localisation des personnages allant jusqu'à 65%.

Abstract: Comic books digitization combined with subsequent comic book understanding create a variety of new applications, including mobile reading and data mining. Document understanding in this domain is challenging as comics are semi-structured documents, combining semantically important graphical and textual parts. In this work we detail a novel approach for classifying speech balloon in scanned comics book pages based on their contour time series.

Abstract: Comic books constitute an important cultural heritage asset in many countries. Digitization combined with subsequent document understanding enable direct content-based search as opposed to metadata only search (e.g. album title or author name). Few studies have been done in this direction. In this work we detail a novel approach for the automatic text localization in scanned comics book pages, an essential step towards a fully automatic comics book understanding. We focus on speech text as it is semantically important and represents the majority of the text present in comics. The approach is compared with existing methods of text localization found in the literature and results are presented.

Abstract: Hundreds of millions of figures are available in the biomedical literature, representing important biomedical experimental evidence. Since text is a rich source of information in figures, automatically extracting such text may assist in the task of mining figure information and understanding biomedical documents. Unlike images in the open domain, biomedical figures present a variety of unique challenges. For example, biomedical figures typically have complex layouts, small font sizes, short text, specific text, complex symbols and irregular text arrangements. This paper presents the final results of the ICDAR 2017 Competition on Text Extraction from Biomedical Literature Figures (ICDAR2017 DeTEXT Competition), which aims at extracting (detecting and recognizing) text from biomedical literature figures. Similar to text extraction from scene images and web pictures, ICDAR2017 DeTEXT Competition includes three major tasks, i.e., text detection, cropped word recognition and end-to-end text recognition. Here, we describe in detail the data set, tasks, evaluation protocols and participants of this competition, and report the performance of the participating methods.

Abstract: A new handwritten text database, GERMANA, is presented to facilitate empirical comparison of different approaches to text line extraction and off-line handwriting recognition. GERMANA is the result of digitising and annotating a 764-page Spanish manuscript from 1891, in which most pages only contain nearly calligraphed text written on ruled sheets of well-separated lines. To our knowledge, it is the first publicly available database for handwriting research, mostly written in Spanish and comparable in size to standard databases. Due to its sequential book structure, it is also well-suited for realistic assessment of interactive handwriting recognition systems. To provide baseline results for reference in future studies, empirical results are also reported, using standard techniques and tools for preprocessing, feature extraction, HMM-based image modelling, and language modelling.