Christophe Rigaud received a double European PhD degree in computer science from the University of La Rochelle (France) and the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain) in 2014. He did his research in the laboratory of computer science, image and interaction (L3i) of the University of La Rochelle, supervised by Jean-Christophe Burie, Jean-Marc Ogier and Dimosthenis Karatzas from the Center of Computer Vision (CVC) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Previously, he obtained an engineering degree in Automation Control and Computer Engineering and a Research Masters degree in Mathematics and Applications at the Engineering school of the University of Angers, a License degree at the Institute of Technologies of Salon de Provence in 2008 and a Higher Technical Certificate in design of automated systems in Carpentras (Vaucluse, France) in 2005.
His current research interest is the analysis of comic book images using computer vision techniques. He aims to discover how to make a complete and automatic description of the image content, namely the position of the panels, speech balloons, text and comic characters. This information is stored in a knowledge base that can be, for instance, queried using keywords to find a particular panel (see video), a dialogue or a sequence of actions from a mass of digitized comic books. Other applications are under study such as panel per panel reading on smartphone or tablet, machine-assisted translation and speech synthesis.