Movie2comics: A feast of multimedia artwork

Abstract

As a type of artwork, comics are prevalent and popular around the world. However, although there are several assistive software and tools available, the creation of comics is still a tedious and labor intensive process. This paper proposes a scheme that is able to automatically turn a movie to comics with two principles: (1) optimizing the information reservation of movie; and (2) generating outputs following the rules and styles of comics. The scheme mainly contains three components: script-face mapping, key-scene extraction, and cartoonization. Script-face mapping utilizes face recognition and tracking techniques to accomplish the mapping between character's faces and their scripts. Key-scene extraction then combines the frames derived from subshots and the extracted index frames based on subtitle to select a sequence of frames for cartoonization. Finally, the cartoonization is accomplished via four steps: panel scale, stylization, word balloon placement and comics layout. Experiments conducted on a set of movie clips have demonstrates the usefulness and effectiveness of the scheme. © 2010 ACM.