An Automated Procedure for Word Balloon Placement in Cinema Comics

Comics has been studied for a long time, as they are the oldest genre of non-photorealistic rendering. Especially, it is a very interesting work to transform a video into a comics in an automatic manner. As a kind of sub-work for this, we introduce a method to automatically place word balloons in an image in this paper. It is not trivial to place the time-serial word balloons with keeping the rules of 2D comics text layout. Our algorithm first positions each word balloon relative to its respective actor while maintaining the reading order of dialogues by applying a cartographical labeling algorithm. The position of each balloon is then refined on the basis of our proposed measure that estimates the quality of balloon layout. We experiment with several commercial cinemas, which shows that the final results are good enough to compare with hand-drawn comics.