ajunlonglive / kumiko

Kumiko, the Comics Cutter

Introduction

Kumiko mascot by Hurluberlue, CC-BY-SA 4.0

Kumiko, the Comics Cutter is a set of tools to compute useful information about comic book pages, panels, and more. Its main strength is to find out the locations of panels within a comic's page (image file). Kumiko can also compile information about panels for all pages in a comic book, and present it as one piece of data (JSON-formatted object).

Kumiko makes use of the great (freely licensed) opencv library, which provides image processing algorithms of all sorts. Mainly, the contour detection algorithm is used to detect panels within an image.

Demo

TL;WR Too Long; Won't Read the whole doc?

A live demo is now available here, where you can try Kumiko out and cut your own comic pages into panels.

Philosophy

Kumiko aims at being a functional library to extract information from comic pages / books. The goal is to provide a set of tools that is usable beforehand, to extract all needed information.

External programs can later use the generated information for different purposes: panel-by-panel viewing, actual splitting of an image down into panels, etc.

Panel-by-panel comic reading

Being able to jump from one panel to the next was the original idea behind Kumiko.

xkcd by Randall Munroe, #208, CC BY-NC 2.5

Comic viewers usually imply a very common page-by-page reading paradigm. You read a page, possibly zooming on it to be able to read speech bubbles, then click, tap, press a key or swipe to go to the next page.

With knowledge about panels locations, we can imagine a comic reader that also offers panel-by-panel reading. This is especially interesting for small screens, on which you probably can't read the texts if a whole page is displayed.

Just run kumiko -i /path/to/comicpage.jpg -b firefox on your comicpage.jpg file, and read it panel-by-panel in your browser!

Requirements

apt-get install python3-opencv will install the only necessary library needed: opencv.

This should do the trick for Debian distros and derivatives (Ubuntu, Linux Mint...). If you successfully use Kumiko on any other platform, please let us know!

Kumiko now uses python3.

Usage & Testing

See the usage doc for details on how to use the Kumiko tools.

Also check the testing doc if you want to test modified versions of the code.

Numbering

The numbering is left-to-right, or right-to-left if requested.

Here is an example of how Kumiko is going to number panels by default (numbers and red lines not in the original picture).

Pepper & Carott by David Revoy, episode 2, CC BY 4.0

Limitations

For now, Kumiko only deals with clear (white-ish) and dark (black-ish) backgrounds. Panels within a comic page will be any "object" that has non-white & non-black boundaries (not necessarily vertical or horizontal lines).

If you have ideas on how to programmatically guess the background color of a page, please let us know!

Short- and longer-term awesome features (roadmap)

Kumiko library

• detect panels on a growing range of comic page layouts

  • detect non-framed panels (without clear boundaries/borders)
  • separate intertwined panels

• be able to detect panel contours on pages with non-white, non-black background

  • implies being able to determine the background color: histogram, probing of some kind? (worst case: manually?)

Back-office (validation / edition tool)

Let's face it: we probably can't ensure that Kumiko can perfectly find out the panels in any image. There is a huge diversity of panel boundaries, layouts and whatnot.

This is why we should have some kind of back-office / editing tool that lets a human editor:

• validate pages
• add, delete, move or resize incorrect panels
• report bugs
• ...

Such a tool should edit the JSON file representing a comic book information, for later use by other programs that'll rely on it.