Brush Footprint Acquisition and Preliminary Analysis for Chinese Calligraphy using a Robot Drawing Platform

A robot drawing platform supporting four degrees of freedom (x, y, z and z-rotation) of a brush-pen motion for studying Chinese painting and calligraphy has been operational in our laboratory. This paper describes the real-time capturing and data analysis of the brush footprint using the new hardware and software capabilities in the platform. They include a transparent drawing plate and an underneath camera system, together with projective rectification and video segmentation algorithms. Preliminary result of the footprint analysis and nonparametric modeling, and their applications to well-known Chinese calligraphy are demonstrated