ComSem: Digitization and Semantic Annotation of Comic Books

The popularity of digital comic books keeps rising, causing an increase in interest from traditional publishers. Digitizing existing comic books can require much work though, since older comic books were made when digital versions were not taken into account. Additions such as digital panel segmentation and semantic annotation, which increase the discoverability and functionality, were only introduced at a later point in time. To this end, we made ComSem: a tool to support publishers in this task by automating certain steps in the process and making others more accessible. In this paper we present our demo and how it can be used to easily detect comic book panels and annotate them with semantic metadata.