Comics is a medium constituted of images combining text and graphics elements. This different visual information is used by the authors to narrate a story. Nowadays, comic books are a widespread cultural expression all over the world and especially in the United States, European countries, and Asian countries. So, the terms of Comics include several categories such as Mangas, American Comics, and Franco-Belgian “Bandes Dessinées”. Each category has its own graphic style. From the research point of view, comics images are attractive targets because the structure of a comics page includes various elements (such as panels, speech balloons, captions, leading characters, text, onomatopoeia, and so on). The design of these elements strongly depends on the creativity of the author and his graphic universe. Consequently, the drawings present a very large variability. Therefore, comics image analysis is not a trivial problem and is still immature compared with other areas of application of image analysis and pattern recognition. Comics offer many challenges for researchers. For example, the detection and recognition of the characters in a comics page are not trivial since the main character can be a human being, an animal, or even an imaginary character. In this context, the “pattern recognition” task is a tricky problem. Comics analysis has aroused interest among researchers. The number of scientific papers dealing with comics analysis has significantly increased in international conferences and journals during the last ten years. The original approaches proposed in these papers in the area of computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning, show that comics analysis and understanding can be considered as a research topic. Moreover, the drawings of some comics are very similar to the ones of cartoons. So, some approaches can be applied to both media.
Please note that all ICPR workshops will take place in the Louis Néel Building, rather than in the main conference center.
MANPU will be held on Saturday, August 22, in Room B4 of the Louis Néel Building at the following address:
53 Av. Jean Capelle E, 69100 Villeurbanne, France
https://www.google.com/maps?ll=45.783714,4.882288&z=18&hl=fr-FR&gl=US&mapclient=apiv3&cid=1632147326884673947
All this information is available on the ICPR website:
https://icpr2026.org/workshops.html#WSOverview
| Title and abstract submission due: | May 10th, 2026 (updated!) |
| Paper submission due: | May 10th, 2026 (updated!) |
| Notification of acceptance: | June 4th, 2026 (extended) |
| Camera-ready paper due: | written in the invitations to corresponding authors of accepted papers from Springer (updated!) |
| Workshop: | August 22nd, 2026 |
Registration should be done via the 28th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2026) website.
See detail on ICPR 2026 registration.
The deadline of the early bird fee is June 17th.
NOTE
eBDtheque consists of 100 images with ground truth for panels, speech balloons, tails, text lines, leading characters.
website: http://ebdtheque.univ-lr.fr/
Manga109 consists of over 20 thousand images of 109 volumes (21,142 images).
website: http://www.manga109.org/en/
All papers will have to be submitted through the Microsoft CMT service on or before the submission deadline. The paper reviews of MANPU 2026 follow double-blind review policy. The conference workshop proceeding will be published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.
Paper format and lengthPapers should be formatted with LNCS format available on the ICPR 2026 website. A paper should not exceed 15 pages including references. If the paper exceeds 15 pages, the author must pay 150€ for each additional page. Only full paper (more than 6 pages) will be accepted. Only PDF files are accepted.
NotesPapers should describe original work on an MANPU-related topic. By submitting a manuscript to MANPU 2026, authors acknowledge that it has not been previously published or accepted for publication in substantially similar form in any peer-reviewed venue including journals or conferences. Also authors confirm that no paper substantially similar in content has been or will be submitted to another conference or workshop during the review period. The acceptance of a paper to MANPU 2026 requires that at least one of the authors registers for the workshop (see the note in Registration) and presents the paper there. MANPU 2026 does not allow submission of any additional supplementary file.
Submission siteThe Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support. Please visit https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/MANPU2026.
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Opening 8:30 - 8:40 |
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Keynote speech 8:40 - 10:05 |
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TBA |
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Coffee break 10:05 - 10:25 |
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Oral Session 10:25 - 12:30 |
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9thArtOnto: Towards an ontology for representing visual and narrative structures Alexandre Jaud, Jean-Christophe Burie (La Rochelle University, France), Vincent Nguyen (University of Orleans, France), Christophe Rigaud, and Samuel Petit (Mangas.IO, France) |
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Advancing Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Comics via Multi-disciplinary, Multi-Task, Multi-Lingual Transfer Learning Umer Mushtaq, Jean-Christophe Burie, and Antoine Doucet (La Rochelle University, France) |
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Learning Shared Visual Representations for Manga Title and Target Classification: A Multi-Task Closed and Open-Set Evaluation Rosario Licciardello, Georgia Fargetta, Alessandro Ortis, and Sebastiano Battiato (University of Catania, Italy) |
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Drawing Boundaries: Evaluating a Heuristic Baseline for Panel Detection in Jack Kirby Comics John Walsh and Faye Jelenski (Indiana University, USA) |
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A Learning Support System Using Question Generation Based on Oral Reading Behavior when Reading English Manga Sotaro Takaguchi (Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan), Motoi Iwata (Kyoto Tachibana University, Japan), and Koichi Kise (Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan) |
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Closing 12:30 - 12:40 |
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| Jean-Christophe Burie | University of La Rochelle, France | |
| Motoi Iwata | Kyoto Tachibana University, Japan | |
| Yusuke Matsui | The University of Tokyo, Japan |
| Tien-Tsin Wong | Monash University, Australia | |
| Ryosuke Yamanishi | Kansai University, Japan |
| Kiyoharu Aizawa | The University of Tokyo, Japan | |
| Koichi Kise | Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan | |
| Jean-Marc Ogier | University of La Rochelle, France | |
| Toshihiko Yamasaki | The University of Tokyo, Japan |
| Olivier Augerau | Ecole nationale d’ingénieurs de Brest, France | |
| Ying Cao | ShanghaiTech University, China | |
| Wei-Ta Chu | National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan | |
| Seiji Hotta | Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan | |
| Tong-Yee Lee | National Cheng-Kung University, Taiwan | |
| Chengze Li | St. Francis University, Hong Kong | |
| Xueting Liu | The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong | |
| Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman | University of La Rochelle, France | |
| Mitsunori Matsushita | Kansai University, Japan | |
| Tetsuya Mihara | University of Tsukuba, Japan | |
| Satoshi Nakamura | Meiji University, Japan | |
| Vincent Nguyen | University of Orleans, France | |
| Frédéric Rayar | Tours University, France | |
| Christophe Rigaud | University of La Rochelle, France | |
| Yasuyuki Sumi | Future University Hakodate, Japan | |
| Miki Ueno | The Kyoto College of Graduate Studies for Informatics, Japan | |
| John Walsh | Indiana University, USA | |
| Minshan Xie | The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong |
| Endorsed by IAPR |