Exploring The Aesthetic Values and Components of Digital Graphic Novels: A Systematic Review

The digital graphic novel (DGN) is a comic book evolution that tells stories in a range of genres. Due to its benefits, DGN has gained a reputation over the years. This paper explores the theoretical parts of DGNs that make them valuable resources for research and information, identifies the benefits for designers, researchers, and DGN readers. Nonetheless, this study focuses on the aesthetic values and components in designing appealing DGNs. A systematic literature review has been performed on 128 sources. In general, findings from this review have classified five benefits of DGN that impact the educational areas; DGN can encourage learners to read, able to improve critical thinking, serve as a new dimension of learning, build visual literacy, and able to give positive values in learning. This study summarizes the current literature and identified six aesthetic elements and fourteen components that affect the design of DGNs. This study presented a research outline with several opportunities for researchers and practitioners to explore aesthetic values

Segmentation et indexation d'objets complexes dans les images de bandes dessinées

In this thesis, we review, highlight and illustrate the challenges related to comic book image analysis in order to give to the reader a good overview about the last research progress in this field and the current issues. We propose three different approaches for comic book image analysis that are composed by several processing. The first approach is called "sequential'' because the image content is described in an intuitive way, from simple to complex elements using previously extracted elements to guide further processing. Simple elements such as panel text and balloon are extracted first, followed by the balloon tail and then the comic character position in the panel. The second approach addresses independent information extraction to recover the main drawback of the first approach : error propagation. This second method is called “independent” because it is composed by several specific extractors for each elements of the image without any dependence between them. Extra processing such as balloon type classification and text recognition are also covered. The third approach introduces a knowledge-driven and scalable system of comics image understanding. This system called “expert system” is composed by an inference engine and two models, one for comics domain and another one for image processing, stored in an ontology. This expert system combines the benefits of the two first approaches and enables high level semantic description such as the reading order of panels and text, the relations between the speech balloons and their speakers and the comic character identification.Dans ce manuscrit de thèse, nous détaillons et illustrons les différents défis scientifiques liés à l'analyse automatique d'images de bandes dessinées, de manière à donner au lecteur tous les éléments concernant les dernières avancées scientifiques en la matière ainsi que les verrous scientifiques actuels. Nous proposons trois approches pour l'analyse d'image de bandes dessinées. La première approche est dite "séquentielle'' car le contenu de l'image est décrit progressivement et de manière intuitive. Dans cette approche, les extractions se succèdent, en commençant par les plus simples comme les cases, le texte et les bulles qui servent ensuite à guider l'extraction d'éléments plus complexes tels que la queue des bulles et les personnages au sein des cases. La seconde approche propose des extractions indépendantes les unes des autres de manière à éviter la propagation d'erreur due aux traitements successifs. D'autres éléments tels que la classification du type de bulle et la reconnaissance de texte y sont aussi abordés. La troisième approche introduit un système fondé sur une base de connaissance a priori du contenu des images de bandes dessinées. Ce système permet de construire une description sémantique de l'image, dirigée par les modèles de connaissances. Il combine les avantages des deux approches précédentes et permet une description sémantique de haut niveau pouvant inclure des informations telles que l'ordre de lecture, la sémantique des bulles, les relations entre les bulles et leurs locuteurs ainsi que les interactions entre les personnages

Guided Semantic Annotation of Comic Panels with Sewelis

International audienceUTILIS (Updating Through Interaction in Logical Information Systems), introduced in a research paper at EKAW'12, is an interactive process to help users create new objects in a RDF graph. While creating a new object, relaxation rules are applied to its current description to find similar objects, whose properties serve as suggestions to expand the description. UTILIS is implemented in Sewelis, a system that reconciles the expressiveness of querying languages (e.g., SPARQL), and the benefits of exploratory search found in faceted search. The same interaction principles are used for both exploration and creation of semantic data. We illustrate the UTILIS approach by applying Sewelis to the semantic annotation of comic panels, reusing the dataset that was used for a user evaluation