IIT Jodhpur develops software framework for converting digital comics to video

NEW DELHI: Digital Humanities (DH) researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Jodhpur have developed a framework for creating a software, Comic-to-Video Network (C2VNet) to convert digital comic books to video.

The C2VNet will be programmed to produce a video along with audio of a digital storybook from the comic strips. The software is supposed to take in a digital comic book as input and create an audiovisual animated movie from it. The IIT Jodhpur researchers have also proposed a dataset titled “IMCDB: Indian Mythological Comic Dataset of Digitized Indian Comic Storybook” in the English language, along with the software.

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“The CPENet provides over 97% accuracy, and speech balloon segmentation model SBSNet has 98% accuracy. Both are more advanced than existing state-of-art models. C2VNet is the first step towards the future of automatic multimedia creation of comic books,” says Chiranjoy Chattopadhyay, assistant professor, department of computer science and engineering, IIT Jodhpur.

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IIT Jodhpur’s DH works on ideas and methods that can lead to preserving, reconstructing, transmitting, and interpreting human records historically and contemporaneously. It focuses on knowledge production through digital data from material objects, thereby rethinking existing processes of knowledge production.

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“The team also plans to work further on the software framework to modify the software so as to make the multimedia books more immersive and engaging for readers. A lot of effort and time goes into developing such interactive multimedia books. But with the help of this software, it can be done quickly and can be made much more interactive,” says a statement from IITJ.