An Image Search Method for Chinese Character Inscription Based on Optical Flow

Chinese character inscription is an important part of Chinese culture. With China´s increasing efforts to protect traditional culture, more and more Chinese character inscription images are captured and stored in the digital culture museum. How to search a Chinese character is becoming an interesting research topic. The most important thing for searching an image is to define the similarity between two images. In this paper, we propose an image search method for Chinese character inscription images based on optical flow method. The two images are aligned with the optical flow and then the distance is measured. Considering with the noise in the images, a novel optical flow model with a L1-regularization for data term and a L2 smoothness term is proposed. We have tested our method on a database with more than one thousand images. And our method can return good results in several seconds.