  Manga, or comics, which are a type of multimodal artwork, have been left
behind in the recent trend of deep learning applications because of the lack of
a proper dataset. Hence, we built Manga109, a dataset consisting of a variety
of 109 Japanese comic books (94 authors and 21,142 pages) and made it publicly
available by obtaining author permissions for academic use. We carefully
annotated the frames, speech texts, character faces, and character bodies; the
total number of annotations exceeds 500k. This dataset provides numerous manga
images and annotations, which will be beneficial for use in machine learning
algorithms and their evaluation. In addition to academic use, we obtained
further permission for a subset of the dataset for industrial use. In this
article, we describe the details of the dataset and present a few examples of
multimedia processing applications (detection, retrieval, and generation) that
apply existing deep learning methods and are made possible by the dataset.
