Triangular Mesh Based Stroke Segmentation for Chinese Calligraphy

This paper proposes a novel stroke extraction method for the Chinese character. In our method, a Chinese character is represented as a set of triangular mesh that is generated by using the canny contour detector and the constraint Delaunay triangulation (CDT). Based on the representation, the singular regions and the sub-strokes are firstly determined by the properties of triangular mesh. The point-to-boundary orientation distance (PBOD) of one triangular mesh is generated to discriminate whether it should be involved in singular regions. Then, the singular regions and sub-strokes are modeled with a graph. Two sub-strokes are connected if they are continuous in the singular region and recover the part contour of the stroke damaged by the singular region. Finally, this method is used to extract the stroke with variable width in Chinese characters, such as type of Kai in the tablet inscription. Experimental results show that the proposed method is feasible and effective.