Intelligent Chinese calligraphy beautification from handwritten characters for robotic writing

摘要

Chinese calligraphy is the artistic expression of character writing and is highly valued in East Asia. However, it is a challenge for non-expert users to write visually pleasing calligraphy with his or her own unique style. In this paper, we develop an intelligent system that beautifies Chinese handwriting characters and physically writes them in a certain calligraphy style using a robotic arm. First, we sketch the handwriting characters using a mouse or a touch pad. Then, we employ a convolutional neural network to identify each stroke from the skeletons, and the corresponding standard stroke is retrieved from a pre-built calligraphy stroke library for robotic arm writing. To output aesthetically beautiful calligraphy with the user's style, we propose a global optimization approach to solve the minimization problem between the handwritten strokes and standard calligraphy strokes, in which a shape character vector is presented to describe the shape of standard strokes. Unlike existing systems that focus on the generation of digital calligraphy from handwritten characters, our system has the advantage of converting the user-input handwriting into physical calligraphy written by a robotic arm. We take the regular script (Kai) style as an example and perform a user study to evaluate the effectiveness of the system. The writing results show that our system can achieve visually pleasing calligraphy from various input handwriting while retaining the user's style.