The Manga Whisperer: Automatically Generating Transcriptions for Comics

Ragav Sachdeva, Andrew Zisserman; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 12967-12976

In the past few decades Japanese comics commonly referred to as Manga have transcended both cultural and linguistic boundaries to become a true worldwide sensation. Yet the inherent reliance on visual cues and illustration within manga renders it largely inaccessible to individuals with visual impairments. In this work we seek to address this substantial barrier with the aim of ensuring that manga can be appreciated and actively engaged by everyone. Specifically we tackle the problem of diarisation i.e. generating a transcription of who said what and when in a fully automatic way. To this end we make the following contributions: (1) we present a unified model Magi that is able to (a) detect panels text boxes and character boxes (b) cluster characters by identity (without knowing the number of clusters apriori) and (c) associate dialogues to their speakers; (2) we propose a novel approach that is able to sort the detected text boxes in their reading order and generate a dialogue transcript; (3) we annotate an evaluation benchmark for this task using publicly available [English] manga pages.