S. Vishnu Sharma
IIT Jodhpur researchers are developing a framework for creating software – Comic-to-Video Network (C2VNet) to convert born digital, or digitized comic books, to video.
Growing digitization has increased the need to digitize our country’s cultural heritage. This framework revolves around creating an audio-video storybook, say IIT Jodhpur researchers.
IIT Jodhpur researchers
IIT Jodhpur researchers at Digitial Humanities (DH) unit are developing a framework for creating software. DH at IIT Jodhpur focuses on and contributes to, a composite of approaches (ideas and methods), rather than different approaches, that lay emphasis on preserving, reconstructing, transmitting, and interpreting human record historically and contemporaneously, say IIT Jodhpur researchers.
Epistemological questions
This, in major ways, attends to epistemological questions on knowledge production about generating digital data from material objects, and rethinking of existing processes of knowledge production, say IIT Jodhpur researchers.
Methods and methodologies that can create the desired multimedia content have grown as a result of advances in technology. One such instance is “Automatic image synthesis”, which has gained a lot of attention among researchers, say IIT Jodhpur researchers.
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In contrast, audio-video scene synthesis, such as that based on document images, remains challenging and under researched, say IIT Jodhpur researchers.
This field of DH lacks sustained analysis of multimodality in automatic content synthesis and its growing impact on digital scholarship in the humanities. The C2VNet is a step towards bridging this gap, say IIT Jodhpur researchers.
C2VNet
The C2VNet evolves panel-by-panel in a comic strip and eventually produces a full-length video (with audio) of a digitized or born-digital storybook, say IIT Jodhpur researchers.
The goal was to design and develop software that takes a born-digital or digitized comic book as input and produces an audiovisual animated movie from it, say IIT Jodhpur researchers.
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Along with the software, IIT Jodhpur researchers have proposed a dataset titled “IMCDB: Indian Mythological Comic Dataset of Digitized Indian Comic Storybook” in the English language.
This has complete annotations for panels, binary masks of the text balloon and text files for each speech balloon and narration box within a panel and plans to make the dataset publicly available, say IIT Jodhpur researchers.
Dr. Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay
Dr. Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Jodhpur spoke about the work being done by IIT Jodhpur researchers.
The panel extraction model C2VNet has two internal networks to support the video creation. CPENet developed by IIT Jodhpur researchers team gives over 97% accuracy, and the speech balloon segmentation model SBSNet gives 98% accuracy with fewer parameters.
Both have outperformed state-of-art models. C2VNet is the first step towards the big future of automatic multimedia creation of comic books to bring new comic reading experiences, said Dr. Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay speaking about IIT Jodhpur researchers.
Study
This is a one-of-a-kind study to discuss the automation of creating audio-visual content from scanned document images.
In the future, the team is working towards improving the software so that these multimedia books become more immersive and engaging for the target audience.
Usually, this kind of work takes more time and effort, but with this software, it can be done quickly and in a more interactive way.
About IIT Jodhpur
Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur was established in 2008, to foster technology education and research in India. The institute is committed to technological thought and action to benefit the economic development of India.
Scholarship in teaching and learning; scholarship in research and creative accomplishments; and relevance to industry are three driving forces for us at IIT Jodhpur.
IIT Jodhpur functions from its sprawling residential Permanent Campus of 852 acres on National Highway 65, North-Northwest of Jodhpur towards Nagaur.
This campus is meticulously planned and envisioned to stand as a symbol of academics. A large parcel of the Permanent Campus (of about 182 acres) is set aside for the development of a Technology Park to strengthen institute-industry interactions.
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The institute is committed to a multidisciplinary approach of technology development. Hence, it has established state-of-the-art laboratories for basic research and has organized its academic degree activities through Departments and its coordinated research through Centers for Technologies.
