AI extracts speech bubbles from comic strips

Case in point: Researchers at Google parent company Alphabet's DeepMind recently revealed in an academic paper that they'd developed a system capable of segmenting CT scans with "near-human performance." Now, scientists at the University of Potsdam in Germany have developed an AI segmentation tool for a slightly more cartoony medium: comics. In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org During tests involving a dataset containing speech bubbles with "wiggly tails" and "curved corners," it achieved an F1 score (a measure of a test's accuracy) of 0.94, which the researchers claim is state-of-the-art. "Speech balloons usually consist of a carrier, [a symbolic device used to hold the text,] and a tail connecting the carrier to its root character from which the text emerges. Both tails and carriers come in a variety of shapes, outlines, and degrees of wiggliness," the researchers explain.