Digital rubbings creation based on ink diffusion

Cliff inscriptions in ancient China play very important role to record the historical relics, such as calligraphy, sculpture, art and so on. Although Chinese ancestors invent rubbing technique to preserve the valuable cliff inscriptions, lots of cliff inscriptions are eroded or damaged with time going on. In this paper, we propose a digital method to create rubbing images using photos of cliff inscriptions. First, the rubbing background texture is acquired through stitching some rubbing background images after adjust the intensity levels. Second, the characters of inscriptions are rectified and segmented from photos automatically or manually. Next, we use ink diffusion method to produce rubbing effect. Finally, the background and the processed character image are fused together to get the digital rubbing. Photogrammetry method can be used to measure the real size of the characters. Experiments show that our method can create rubbing image with the effect as same as the real rubbing.