Author: Jochen Laubrock

We are giving two presentations at the European Society of Cognitive Psychology (ESCoP) in beautiful Tenerife. Jochen Laubrock, Jinger Pan and Ming Yan use gaze-contingent parafoveal fast-priming to show that parafoveal preview is not always beneficial, but can also incur a cost given enough time for preview processing. David Dubray and Jochen Laubrock summarize their work on illustrator classification and semantic segmentation of comics using deep convolutional neural networks, based on the Graphic Narrative Corpus. See you on Sep 28th!

Two papers have been accepted for this year’s International Conference on Document Image Analysis (ICDAR) and the accompanying GREC workshop on Graphics Image Recognition in Sydney. We will present recent work in which we trained deep fully convolutional neural networks for image segmentation on the Graphic Narrative corpus. David Dubray and Jochen Laubrock present a paper on speech balloon detection and segmentation in comics, which Jochen Laubrock and David Dubray extend to multi-class semantic segmentation.

David Dubray and Jochen Laubrock just published a preprint on automatic speech balloon detection and segmentation using deep CNNs, https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.08137. The fully convolutional model, trained on our GNC annotations, achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GNC as well as the eBDtheque data sets. Such semantic segmentation of images is an interesting problem in computer vision and document analysis. Speech balloon (and caption) segmentation can also be considered an important step in building an OCR pipeline for analyzing text in graphic novels.

Our DH 2017 contribution outlining how to improve the annotation tool using eye tracking and convolutional neural networks. DH 2017 was a great conference overall. I particularly enjoyed the pre-conference workshop on Computer Vision in Digital Humanities, in which we presented a lightning talk.

Jochen Laubrock is going to present the keynote lecture at EMIP’17 Spring Academy (Eye Movements in Programming) at Free University Berlin on Thursday, March 16th. Looks like an interesting and under-researched conference theme. Hope to see you there!