Author: Kyle Wiggers / Source: VentureBeat
Segmentation — partitioning an image or scan into multiple segments, or sets of pixels — is a task at which artificial intelligence (AI) excels.
Case in point: Researchers at Google parent company Alphabet’s DeepMind recently revealed in an academic paper that they’d developed a system capable of segmenting CT scans with “near-human performance.” Now, scientists at the University of Potsdam in Germany have developed an AI segmentation tool for a slightly more cartoony medium: comics.In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org (“Deep CNN-based Speech Balloon Detection and Segmentation for Comic Books“), they describe a neural network (i.e., layers of mathematical functions modeled after biological neurons) that can detect and isolate speech bubbles in graphic novels and comic books. During tests involving a dataset containing speech bubbles with “wiggly tails” and “curved corners,” it achieved an F1 score (a measure of a test’s accuracy) of 0.94, which the researchers claim is state-of-the-art.
“Speech balloons usually consist of a carrier, [a symbolic device used to hold the text,] and a tail connecting the carrier to its root character from which the text emerges. Both tails and carriers come in a variety of shapes, outlines, and degrees of wiggliness,” the researchers explain. “It … pays to classify [speech bubbles] as different classes,…
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