{"pk":49486,"title":"How Panel Layouts Define Manga: Insights from Visual Ablation Experiments","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Manga has gained global popularity, yet how its visual elements, such as characters, text, and panel layouts, reflect the uniqueness of individual works remains underexplored. This study investigates the contribution of panel layouts to manga identity through both quantitative and qualitative analysis. We trained a deep learning model to classify manga titles based solely on facing page images, and performed ablation experiments by removing characters and text, retaining only panel frame structures. Using 10,122 images from 104 works in 12 genres in the Manga109 dataset, we demonstrate that panel layouts alone enable high-accuracy classification. Grad-CAM visualizations further reveal that the models focus on layout features such as size, spacing, and alignment. These findings suggest that panel layouts encode work-specific stylistic patterns and support visual narrative comprehension, highlighting their role as a key component of manga's visual identity.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Computer Science; Art and Cognition; Creativity; Machine learning; Computer-based experiment"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/02z7180n","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Siyuan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Feng","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Tokyo","department":""},{"first_name":"Teruya","middle_name":"","last_name":"Yoshinaga","name_suffix":"","institution":"Sophia University","department":""},{"first_name":"Katsuhiko","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hayashi","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Tokyo","department":""},{"first_name":"Koki","middle_name":"","last_name":"Washio","name_suffix":"","institution":"freelance researcher","department":""},{"first_name":"Hidetaka","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kamigaito","name_suffix":"","institution":"Nara Institute of Science and Technology","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T12:00:00-06:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49486/galley/37448/download/"}]}