Estimating Groups of Featured Characters in Comics with Sequence of Characters' Appearance

This paper proposes a method to estimate a group of featured characters during an arbitrary period in comics. Comics have so many aspects of attractiveness such as illustrations and quotes. The storyline, which is one of the attractive of comics, enables us to enjoy the dramas in comics. In comics, the story is driven by characters' activities represented in multimedia forms: emotion, speech, and some other actions. This paper, as a first step to recognize the storyline, tackles the estimation of a group of featured characters in a given period. To compute the storyline of comics with the facility, the proposed method uses a sequence of characters' appearances for each page. The experiment showed that the proposed method outperformed the comparative methods in estimating groups of featured characters with a 0.82 F-value on average while comparative methods showed 0.67 and 0.48. The results showed that sequences of characters' appearance, which are relatively easy to obtain, were sufficient to catch the brief storyline i.e. featured characters in a story.