Film comic generation with eye tracking

Abstract

Automatic generation of film comic requires solving several challenging problems such as selecting important frames well conveying the whole story, trimming the frames to fit the shape of panels without corrupting the composition of original image and arranging visually pleasing speech balloons without hiding important objects in the panel. We propose a novel approach to the automatic generation of film comic. The key idea is to aggregate eye-tracking data and image features into a computational map, called iMap, for quantitatively measuring the importance of frames in terms of story content and user attention. The transition of iMap in time sequences provides the solution to frame selection. Word balloon arrangement and image trimming are realized as the results of optimizing the energy functions derived from the iMap. © Springer-Verlag 2013.