Arbitrary Screen-Aware Manga Reading Framework with Parameter-Optimized Panel Extraction

Abstract

While reading Manga on smart devices, it is inconvenient to drag and zoom through contents. Therefore, this work proposes a user-friendly and intuitive Manga reading framework for arbitrary reading conditions. Our framework creates a reading flow by breaking pages into contextual panels, organizing panels as display units, grouping units as a display list according to reading conditions, and playing the list with designed eye-movement-simulated transitions. The core is parameter-optimized panel extraction, which uses the occupied area of extracted panels and the ratio of borders parallel to each other to automate parameter selection for matching up identified panel corners and borders. While applying to 70 Manga chapters, our extraction performs comparatively better against two state-of-the-art algorithms and successfully locates “break-outs.” Furthermore, a usability test on three chapters demonstrates that our framework is effective and visually pleasing for arbitrary Manga-reading scenarios while preserving contextual ideas through panel arrangement.