Automatic generation of Chinese calligraphic writings with style imitation

A parametric representation of stroke shapes is derived by adopting style imitation, a shape-generation-based process, to compactly represent the shapes of single strokes for the automatic generation of Chinese calligraphic writings. An image-processing-based approach is employed to derive the distance between the two strokes. The concept of stroke context is introduced to determine the shape of a stroke to be produced and the distance between two strokes is defined as the shortest distance between two points. An important difference between personal handwriting and a script generated from a font system is that a human writer writes a certain stroke or character differently each time, while a font system generates the same output. The shape-based criterion used in this study makes direct use of areas, which is more reliable than using shape contours because stroke contour details vary greatly.published_or_final_versio

A New digital calligraphic font

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Writing a Picture : Adolph Gottlieb\u27s Rolling and Yoshihara Jiro\u27s Red Circle on Black

Calligraphy and calligraphic elements in abstract art demonstrate the differences between Japanese and American approaches to abstraction. An examination of the use of calligraphy in Japanese art can reveal how its historic tradition in Japan lends depth and meaning to an image, which is not effectively possible for American artists using the same forms. These differences descend from a Japanese writing system that developed as abstracted images in themselves. Though the Western tradition of Abstract Expressionism art sought to make the experience of painting purely visual without the aid of narrative, explanation, or text, both American and Japanese artists used calligraphic forms. In a word and image analysis, this thesis demonstrates how these calligraphic forms can reveal layers of meaning within their appropriate cultural context. Reconciling calligraphy with abstract art presents the conflict of East meeting West in a new form

The materiality, style, and culture of calligraphy in the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127)

The cultural accomplishments of the Northern Song dynasty are unrivalled in Chinese history. Song literati were particularly enthusiastic about calligraphy and writing materials, and the scale of their engagement in the art of writing exceeded that of both former and later dynasties, leaving plentiful legacies of calligraphic culture for later generations to study and appreciate. However, most modern studies emphasize the transmission of calligraphic culture from the Tang to Song and neglect the dynamics of disconnection and transformation between these two dynasties. By demonstrating how the technologies of brush, paper, ink cake, ink stone, and chair and desk (the "materiality" of calligraphy) shaped the look of calligraphy, this dissertation proposes an alternative understanding of the nature of Song innovations in the art of writing. Insofar as these innovations reconfigured the subsequent history of Sinitic calligraphy (calligraphic traditions based on Chinese characters), this dissertation argues that we cannot understand the art of writing without exploring the technology of writing. Through this study, I present the processes by which the literati of Northern Song traced, received, and modified the calligraphic culture of the past in creating their own Northern Song culture. Because of cultural discontinuity and transformation, what they ultimately reconstructed served as the foundation for their own culture, and has become the basis for how we think of the pre-Song past

AutoGraff: towards a computational understanding of graffiti writing and related art forms.

The aim of this thesis is to develop a system that generates letters and pictures with a style that is immediately recognizable as graffiti art or calligraphy. The proposed system can be used similarly to, and in tight integration with, conventional computer-aided geometric design tools and can be used to generate synthetic graffiti content for urban environments in games and in movies, and to guide robotic or fabrication systems that can materialise the output of the system with physical drawing media. The thesis is divided into two main parts. The first part describes a set of stroke primitives, building blocks that can be combined to generate different designs that resemble graffiti or calligraphy. These primitives mimic the process typically used to design graffiti letters and exploit well known principles of motor control to model the way in which an artist moves when incrementally tracing stylised letter forms. The second part demonstrates how these stroke primitives can be automatically recovered from input geometry defined in vector form, such as the digitised traces of writing made by a user, or the glyph outlines in a font. This procedure converts the input geometry into a seed that can be transformed into a variety of calligraphic and graffiti stylisations, which depend on parametric variations of the strokes

Handwritten Text Generation from Visual Archetypes

Generating synthetic images of handwritten text in a writer-specific style is a challenging task, especially in the case of unseen styles and new words, and even more when these latter contain characters that are rarely encountered during training. While emulating a writer's style has been recently addressed by generative models, the generalization towards rare characters has been disregarded. In this work, we devise a Transformer-based model for Few-Shot styled handwritten text generation and focus on obtaining a robust and informative representation of both the text and the style. In particular, we propose a novel representation of the textual content as a sequence of dense vectors obtained from images of symbols written as standard GNU Unifont glyphs, which can be considered their visual archetypes. This strategy is more suitable for generating characters that, despite having been seen rarely during training, possibly share visual details with the frequently observed ones. As for the style, we obtain a robust representation of unseen writers' calligraphy by exploiting specific pre-training on a large synthetic dataset. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal in generating words in unseen styles and with rare characters more faithfully than existing approaches relying on independent one-hot encodings of the characters.Comment: Accepted at CVPR202

Synesthetic art through 3-D projection: The requirements of a computer-based supermedium

A computer-based form of multimedia art is proposed that uses the computer to fuse aspects of painting, sculpture, dance, music, film, and other media into a one-to-one synthesia of image and sound for spatially synchronous 3-D projection. Called synesthetic art, this conversion of many varied media into an aesthetically unitary experience determines the character and requirements of the system and its software. During the start-up phase, computer stereographic systems are unsuitable for software development. Eventually, a new type of illusory-projective supermedium will be required to achieve the needed combination of large-format projection and convincing real life presence, and to handle the vast amount of 3-D visual and acoustic information required. The influence of the concept on the author's research and creative work is illustrated through two examples

Behavioral response, plan sorting, and financial protection in health insurance markets

In both developed and developing countries, it is important to know about consumer behavior in the health insurance market. The first essay analyzes the behavioral response to income cutoffs of a subsidized health insurance program in the Massachusetts reform. Subsidies in the program are based on household income and have explicit income cutoffs. This feature creates nonlinear budget constraints for households' consumption, and potentially distorts their income and labor supply. I test the existence of income manipulation using the regression discontinuity approach on data from the American Community Survey. I find clear evidence of income discontinuity around the cutoffs of 150% and 300% of the Federal Poverty Level. I construct a structural model to estimate the elasticity of labor supply with respect to wage rates using the discontinuity evidence, suggest a methodology to calculate the welfare loss, and project the magnitude of behavioral response in the national health reform. The second essay analyzes consumer choice of health insurance plans after U.S. health reform. In the new state-run "Health Insurance Exchanges" created as part of the Affordable Care Act, plans with different benefit coverage of health care costs are provided in order to expand consumer choices and increase consumer welfare. According to the Act, premiums can differ based on enrollees' characteristics and plan revenues are risk-adjusted by regulators who transfer revenue from low to high risk plans. This essay examines how risk adjustment and premium discrimination affect consumers' choices of plans theoretically and empirically. I find that under plausible conditions risk adjustment and premium discrimination encourage consumers to enroll in plans with high benefit coverage. The third essay studies how a new Chinese rural health insurance program affects adverse selection and impacts enrollees' out-of-pocket costs. Using a national four-year panel dataset to address households' participating behavior and the impact of the plan, I show that adverse selection was not severe at household level, and the impact of the program on reducing out-of-pocket expense is greater for the rich than that for the poor, although on average was not statistically significant