Text Block Segmentation in Comic Speech Bubbles

Comics and manga text recognition are attracting an increasing research and industrial interest. Also, the state of the art text detection and OCR performances is starting to be mature enough to provide automatic text recognition for a variety of comics and manga writing styles. However, comics text layout sometimes prevents usual text line detection to be applied successfully, even within speech bubbles. In this paper, we propose a domain specific text block detection method able to detect single and multiple text block regions inside speech bubbles, in order to enhance OCR transcription and further post-processing. This approach presents very satisfactory results on all tested bubble styles from Latin and non-Latin scripts.