Analysis of traditional Chinese seals and synthesis of personalized seals

摘要

People have long used seals for various purposes. One practical use of seals is for authentication and a lot of research has been focused on this area. In ancient China, seals revealed one's identity and were commonly used by various classes of people. Traditional Chinese seals can also be considered as a form of art, for people to appreciate and to learn about the culture at different dynasties. Nowadays, at this digital age, we would like not only be able to represent the seals in digital format, but also we would like to use image processing techniques to help us better understand them so that although we are not experts we will still be able to produce good designs. We propose two things: 1) an analysis method to better understand traditional Chinese seals so that we can describe them in a more semantic way rather than just representing each one as a bitmap image; and 2) a synthesis method to generate a new seal image given a handwritten character, while considering the information obtained from the analysis of the traditional Chinese seals.