A layered method for determining manga text bubble reading order

Comic books of all cultures are an active research area as digitizing content for mobile and web is becoming more common. Past research on comics has largely concentrated on text extraction, panel segmentation and document analysis, while the utilisation of the extracted data has had less attention. In this paper we present a method to automatically determine the reading order of Japanese manga text bubbles using only text bubble position and image data. Our method classifies and orders page and text position information on three layers, which are hierarchically sorted to obtain the final ordering. The method is evaluated on a data set of 1769 manga pages with 14726 manually annotated text positions and correct ordering. Evaluation shows the method has over 95% transition accuracies and vastly outperforms a naive implementation.