Sequential Art Image Laboratory – SAIL

Cultural and creative industries are impacted by digital transformation that profoundly change the way we access information. Will Eisner describes comics as the sequential art par excellence. Digital comics disrupts the traditional forms of linear visual narration: scrolling or transitions between panels accentuate this sequential aspect. However, digital technology offers to the 9th Art the opportunity to develop new tools and innovative services that this SAIL laboratory will be eager to bring to light.

The L3i, the “Computer Science Image Interaction Laboratory” of the University of La Rochelle and the Actialuna SAS Laboratory, propose to create the “Sequential Art Image Laboratory (SAIL) and want to carry out a joint innovation program on issues related to exploitation and enhancement of digital comics.

Comic strips represent an important cultural heritage in several countries. The L3i, internationally recognized on document analysis, launched in 2011 the e-bdtheque project. The aim was to enhance digitized comics corpus. The L3i, which has developed dedicated analysis and indexing algorithms, is a major laboratory on this issue at the international level.

Actialuna develops Sequencity, a multiplatform technology for distributing, selling and reading comics in digital format. The platform will be promoted from October 2017 by the giant of the distribution E.Leclerc, who is also the 1st bookseller of Comics in France. Actialuna also accepted in July 2017 the leadership of the Comics, Manga Working Group at the EDRLab, for the next version of EPUB (v.4) supported by the W3C.

In the framework of the “Programme Investissements d’Avenir” (Call Cloud & Big Data n °4, 2015-17), Actialuna and L3i have obtained the iiBD project. Their collaboration allowed the development of a processing chain to analyze the content of digitized comics images. The elements extracted from the comic pages make it possible to propose new tools for the reading and the information retrieval in a corpus of 20000 digitized titles. The production of the technologies developed will be carried out from the end of 2017.
The project has highlighted the complexity and the formal diversity of the comics and the need to establish a very long-term research program to improve and create new analysis algorithms, by tackling many scientific issues. Especially on a corpus that will grow significantly with a large diversity of styles.

The ambition of the SAIL is to combine the skills of the L3i and Actialuna in the development of disruptive tools and services. These innovations, resulting from research works conducted at the L3i, will allow to Sequencity to offer to its users original uses, able to give to Actialuna a real competitive advantage.

One of the first objectives of LabCom is to increase the reliability of the work begun during iiBD project. Moreover, research works that will be carried out in the LabCom will aim to address increasingly complex issues. Thus, beyond the detection of basic elements such as cases, speech balloons or text, the recognition of : handwritten text, characters, actions, decorative elements, onomatopoeias, etc. will require the development of approaches combining skills in image processing, image analysis, knowledge representation and artificial intelligence. With the ultimate goal of obtaining a complete description of albums, pages and cases at the geometric level (layout structure), textual level (text understanding) and graphic level (visual elements). The results of this research will be transferred to Actialuna in order to give to the Sequencity platform a definite competitive advantage, by developing innovative services.