A Study to Achieve Manga Character Retrieval Method for Manga Images

Manga (Japanese style comics) is one of the most popular publications. Nowadays manga is often handled as digital images not only in consumers' use but also in digital media. However, they hardly handle manga as content-based materials. Some digital media use tags or text data for retrieval, where the tags and text data are produced by handmade input. Therefore our goal is achieving content-based retrieval method for manga images. As the first step to the goal, we investigate the performance of Sun's method applying to manga character retrieval. Manga character retrieval means a image retrieval of which the input and output are a character image and page images where the input character appears respectively. It is useful for convenient use of manga images, for example, character retrieval or auto-tagging. We modify Sun's method so as to be applicable to manga character retrieval and then investigate the performance.