In the name of art

In building a digital library of Chinese calligraphy, it is desirable to preserve the dynamic writing as well as the aesthetic properties of the masterpieces. Compared with the work on computer synthesis of Chinese calligraphy, we are dealing with the reverse problem; it can be achieved by performing image analysis on the archaic Chinese calligraphic images to obtain a model-based parametric representation. In this article, we introduce our methodology to preserve archaic Chinese calligraphic images by automatically estimating the set of three-dimensional (3-D) geometric and ink model parameters such as the properties of the brush hair and the variations of ink deposition along the stroke trajectory. The dynamic brush writing of the archaic Chinese characters can then be reproduced with various brush and ink effects so that the calligraphy generation process can be visualized and the masterpieces can be reproduced with high-quality printing in scalable resolution.