Histogram of Exclamation Marks and Its Application for Comics Analysis
This paper proposes a histogram formed by counting the number of exclamation marks in comic books for comics analysis. Exclamation marks in comic books are used for expressing character's emotion and are depicted in frequently excited scenes. Also they are easy to detect from different comic books written by various authors. Hence we represent each comic book by its distribution of exclamation marks as a histogram and use such histogram for topic change detection and visualization of relationships between comic books. Experimental results on real comic books show that our bold approach has potential for approximating of contents of comic books by using the proposed histograms.
FACE DETECTION FOR COMIC IMAGES WITH DEFORMABLE PART MODEL
Comic images include several kinds of picture elements, such as lines, dots, characters and sound effects. Therefore, they form quite complex structure compared with natural images. We have been trying to improve the convenience of e-comics by retrieving metadata elements, such as names of characters and positions of the characters. To extract characters from comic images, a method detecting characters’ face using the Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) features and discriminating them has been proposed. However, this method does not provide stable face detection. In this paper, Deformable Part Model (DMP), which is originally proposed to detect natural objects, is applied to comic images in order to improve accuracy of face detection. As a consequence, it is turned out that we can obtain 85.5 % detection rate for unknown images. Thus, DPM can be regarded an effective method to detect objects in comic images.
"The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative
Critics of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements—gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony— or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some way examines the main theme of the text, the appropriation of power and authority, little of it accomplishes both the textual and contextual analysis that Castle Rackrent deserves. Exploring Thady’s “plain round tale” as a slave narrative in content and form sheds new light on the work both textually and contextually; in Thady Quirk, Edgeworth has created a typical slave narrator who recounts a history of oppression which is ultimately mediated by an outside editor. As John Cronin writes of Castle Rackrent, “What Maria Edgeworth has given us . . . is a magnificently realised slave, a terrifying vision of the results of colonial misrule. There must have been a moment of clearly deliberate artistic decision in which she realised that what needed to be said must be said through one of the submerged people.”1 The three main textual elements of the narrative indicate its likeness to typical slave narratives: its presentation of a conflicted slave narrator, its use of the framing device of the outside editor, and its narrative structure of episodic anecdotes that utilizes memory, description, and didacticism.