A Contour-based Real Time Handwriting Beautification Method And Applications

Calligraphy is a bright pearl in human civilization, and the development of informationtechnology today gives this ancient art of new vitality. Based on the powerful capabilities ofsimulation and graphics computing, people try to simulate real handwriting on a computer,which is a whole new way of heritage and promote this traditional art. Researches on thecomputer handwriting can be summarized as: digital ink and computer-based calligraphy.These two technologies have gotten excellent achievements, but still their flaws. On the onehand, digital ink technology has unique advantages in the information recording andprocessing, but it still works poor in beautification of handwritings; On the other hand,although computer-based calligraphy did well in simulation of real calligraphy, its highequipment requirements for information collection and the enormous amount of computationmake it difficult to implement in practice.With previous researches, our paper proposes a novel handwriting beautification methodbased on the contour extraction, which simulates calligraphy on speed-based stroke-widthmodeling, and outlines beautified strokes with Bezier curves composed contour. This methodcombines the advantages of digital ink and computer-based calligraphy:1) This methodgenerates calligraphy-like stroke contours, which outline realistic calligraphy appearance;2)Bezier curves composed contours brings advantages of vectorization, and makes it convenientto handle handwriting information;3) Contour-based of strokes shorten the time of rendering,so as to improve user’s experience.On the basis of theoretical researches, the paper also built a handwritten beautificationengine for portable touch-screen devices. The engine provides multiple pens like ball pointpen, quill, pencil and others to satisfy users’ need in recording, calligraphy, graffiti, documentannotation and other writing scenarios. What’s more, the cross-platform extension of ourengine shortens the developing period and expands the user coverage.