We present eBDtheque, a database of various comic book images and their ground truth for panels, balloons and text lines plus semantic annotations. The database consists of a hundred pages of various comic book albums, Franco-Belgian, American comics and mangas. Additionally, we present the piece of software used to establish the ground truth and a tool to validate results against this ground truth. Everything is publicly available for scientific use on http://ebdtheque.univ-lr.fr.

To reduce the gap between pixel data and thesaurus semantics, this paper presents a novel approach using mapping between two ontologies on images of drop-capitals (also named drop caps or lettrines): In the first ontology, each drop cap image is endowed with semantic information describing its content. It is generated from a database of lettrines images - namely Ornamental Letter Images Data Base - manually populated by historians with drop cap images annotations. For the second ontology we have developed image processing algorithms to extract image regions on the basis of a number of features. These features, as well as spatial relations, among regions form the basis of the ontology. The ontologies are then enriched by inference rules to annotate some regions to automatically deduce their semantics. In this article, the method is presented together with preliminary experimental results and an illustrative example.