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

Arabic Type Classification System - Qualitative Classification of Historic Arabic Writing Scripts in the Contemporary Typographic Context

The emergence of typography shifted written language into a mechanical tool of transmitting meaning, thereby further reducing the connection of representation of language with the language itself which began with the development of writing systems. Developed from various writing systems and languages, typography is the primary mode of visual communication of language. It has become even more important in the digital world we are living in today. This research examines the relationship of Arabic script conventions and classifications in the context of typographic representation, and how typographic representations of the Arabic language have been distorted due to the influence of Latin typographic guidelines in the development of Arabic typefaces. This history has failed to produce Arabic typefaces that accord with the unique cultural, linguistic and contextual character of the Arabic writing system. To address this, an investigation was carried out, through multiple design research methods and methodologies incorporating typographic studies and theories of embodiment applied to the evolution of the Arabic writing system, calligraphy and typography in the Arab region. The investigation aims to better understand, and respond to problems in the use of typefaces at the intersection of languages and cultures. Through the generation of a typeface classificatory system, linking the ground rules of calligraphic scripts, structural influences of Arabic letterforms, and adapting them into existing typefaces used today, this research proposes a tool to assist designers in the making of typographic decisions in the setting of Arabic language, and in its relationship to roman typography. Key words : Typography, classificatory attributes, Arabic language, culture, linguistics, embodimen

Tradition and Transformation: Cataloguing Chinese Art in the Middle and Late Imperial Eras

After obtaining sovereignty, a new emperor of China often gathers the imperial collections of previous dynasties and uses them as evidence of the legitimacy of the new regime. Some emperors go further, commissioning the compilation projects of bibliographies of books and catalogues of artistic works in their imperial collections not only as inventories but also for proclaiming their imperial power. The imperial collections of art symbolize political and cultural predominance, present contemporary attitudes toward art and connoisseurship, and reflect emperors’ personal taste for art. The attempt of this research project is to explore the practice of art cataloguing during two of the most important reign periods in imperial China: Emperor Huizong of the Northern Song Dynasty (r. 1101-1125) and Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty (r. 1736-1795). Through examining the format and content of the selected painting, calligraphy, and bronze catalogues compiled by both emperors, features of each catalogue reveal the development of cataloguing imperial artistic collections. In addition to constructing a historical line of cataloguing art, this project demonstrates the relationship between contemporary politics, cultures, and art. Further, it offers suggestions about the purpose and function of imperial collections of art, on the one hand, and reflects emperors’ and literati’s attitudes and viewpoints on art and connoisseurship, on the other hand

Chinese calligraphy: character style recognition based on full-page document

Calligraphy plays a very important role in the history of China. From ancient times to modern times, the beauty of calligraphy has been passed down to the present. Different calligraphy styles and structures have made calligraphy a beauty and embodiment in the field of writing. However, the recognition of calligraphy style and fonts has always been a blank in the computer field. The structural complexity of different calligraphy also brings a lot of challenges to the recognition technology of computers. In my research, I mainly discussed some of the main recognition techniques and some popular machine learning algorithms in this field for more than 20 years, trying to find a new method of Chinese calligraphy styles recognition and exploring its feasibility. In our research, we searched for research papers 20 years ago. Most of the results are about the content recognition of modern Chinese characters. At first, we analyze the development of Chinese characters and the basic Chinese character theory. In the analysis of the current recognition of Chinese characters (including handwriting online and offline) in the computer field, it is more important to analyze various algorithms and results, and to analyze how to use the experimental data, besides how they construct the data set used for their test. The research on the method of image processing based on Chinese calligraphy works is very limited, and the data collection for calligraphy test is very limited also. The test of dataset that used between different recognition technologies is also very different. However, it has far-reaching significance for inheriting and carrying forward the traditional Chinese culture. It is very necessary to develop and promote the recognition of Chinese characters by means of computer tecnchque. In the current application field, the font recognition of Chinese calligraphy can effectively help the library administrators to identify the problem of the classification of the copybook, thus avoiding the recognition of the calligraphy font which is difficult to perform manually only through subjective experience. In the past 10 years of technology, some techniques for the recognition of single Chinese calligraphy fonts have been given. Most of them are the pre-processing of calligraphy characters, the extraction of stroke primitives, the extraction of style features, and the final classification of machine learning. The probability of the classification of the calligraphy works. Such technical requirements are very large for complex Chinese characters, the result of splitting and recognition is very large, and it is difficult to accurately divide many complex font results. As a result, the recognition rate is low, or the accuracy of recognition of a specific word is high, but the overall font recognition accuracy is low. We understand that Chinese calligraphy is a certain research value. In the field of recognition, many research papers on the analysis of Chinese calligraphy are based on the study of calligraphy and stroke. However, we have proposed a new method for dealing with font recognition. The recognition technology is based on the whole page of the document. It is studied in three steps: the first step is to use Fourier transform and some Chinese calligraphy images and analyze the results. The second is that CNN is based on different data sets to get some results. Finally, we made some improvements to the CNN structure. The experimental results of the thesis show that the full-page documents recognition method proposed can achieve high accuracy with the support of CNN technology, and can effectively identify the different styles of Chinese calligraphy in 5 styles. Compared with the traditional analysis methods, our experimental results show that the method based on the full-page document is feasible, avoiding the cumbersome font segmentation problem. This is more efficient and more accurate

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

Local Portraiture

Photography is clearly not a mirror of daily life: that images are constructions is especially obvious in19th-century studio portrait photography. This book explores how indigenous Iranian photographers constructed their own realities in contrast to how foreign photographers constructed Iranians’ realities. Through an in-depth comparative visual analysis of 19th-century Iranian portrait photography and Persian painting, the author arrives at the insight that aesthetic preferences correlate with socio-cultural habits and practices in writing, reading and looking. Subsequently, she advocates for a place in a global history of photography for those unknown, local photo histories (such as the Iranian one) and for the indigenous photographers who produced them

Local Portraiture

Photography is clearly not a mirror of daily life: that images are constructions is especially obvious in19th-century studio portrait photography. This book explores how indigenous Iranian photographers constructed their own realities in contrast to how foreign photographers constructed Iranians’ realities. Through an in-depth comparative visual analysis of 19th-century Iranian portrait photography and Persian painting, the author arrives at the insight that aesthetic preferences correlate with socio-cultural habits and practices in writing, reading and looking. Subsequently, she advocates for a place in a global history of photography for those unknown, local photo histories (such as the Iranian one) and for the indigenous photographers who produced them

(Un)Orthodox Orient

The term Orient was born from a Western-created body of knowledge, or rather discourse, with the authority of the West over the East. This paper, through historical and political analysis of the Orient, questions the reasoning and accuracy of the institutionalized Western knowledge of classical cultural archetypes of the East. Orientalism is a product of the West discovering the Orient and dominating and restructuring the Orient. Hence, it is represented by the dominating frameworks. By taking the Orient out of the ideological discourse, this paper emphasizes Orient as an individual and evaluates the Near Eastern art market’s transformation as its own entity