Image-Processing on Max Halford

Comic book panel segmentation

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Edit (2023-05-26) – I’ve learnt about the Kumiko project, which is exactly devoted to slicing comic book panels. There’s even a live tool. I discovered it thanks to being pinged on this issue.

Motivation

I’ve recently been reading some comic books I used to devour as a kid. Especially those from the golden era of francophone comics: Thorgal, Lanfeust, XIII, Tintin, Largo Winch, Blacksad, Aldebaran, etc.

It’s not easy to get my hands on many of them. Luckily enough I found a website called ReadComicOnline which is delightfully profuse. It gives access to comics for free under the murky “fair use” copyright doctrine. I’m very doubtful about the legality of the website, but I’m still using it for lack of a better option.

Halftoning with Go - Part 2

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The next stop on my travel through the world of halftoning will be the implementation of Weighted Voronoi Stippling as described in Adrian Secord’s 2002 paper. This method is more involved than the ones I detailed in my previous blog post, however the results are quite interesting. Again, I did the implementation in Go.

Notice the black dot in the middle of the white square?

Overview

I found a fair amount of resources about the method, most of them being implementations of Adrian Secord’s paper. However, not many of these resources went into the nitty-gritty details which are not obvious for beginners in image processing. Before delving into the code, I want to go through some concepts that may seem obvious to some readers but that I judge worthy of detailing.

Halftoning with Go - Part 1

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Sun, 27 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I stumbled upon this webpage which shows how to use a TSP solver as a halftoning technique. I began to read about related concepts like dithering and stippling. I don’t have any background in photography but I can appreciate the visual appeal of these techniques. As I understand it these techniques were first invented to save ink for printing. However nowadays printing has become cheaper and the modern use of these technique is mostly aesthetic, at least for images.