Our goal in this work is to provide a new tool for automated conversion
of scanned color comic books, as well as some other types of
hand-drawn color illustrations, into a new, high-fidelity rescalable
digital representation, suitable for today’s high resolution digital
reading devices. Black line artwork and lettering are the most important
structural and stylistic element of comic art: black lines are
used to draw outlines, boundaries of panels and speech bubbles, and
as hatching strokes to convey shading and texture. Therefore, both
our digitization process and the resulting representation strive to
faithfully reconstruct the original line artwork and lettering, as well
as to allow significant magnification, enabling full-screen viewing
of individual panels on devices such as the 2048×1536 iPad