Product development for Chinese calligraphy using reverse engineering and rapid prototyping

Abstract

Chinese calligraphy is considered to be one of the most beautiful and meaningful patterns in the world. Calligraphy is an art dating back to the earliest day of Chinese history, and widely practised throughout ancient China even to recent days. Owing to the passage of time, many old carvings of stamp characters have gradually faded. How to preserve these old Chinese cultural artifacts will be some crucial issues for today. Reverse engineering (RE) and rapid prototyping (RP) technology are considered effective tools for product development. This research combines RE, grey prediction theory in pattern processing, geometric modeling for constructing the characters of Chinese calligraphy and RP for model making. First, the written Chinese calligraphy is scanned by a scanner. By using image processing, the contours of the Chinese characters can be detected. The contours for the characters then turn out to be point data which can be easily processed in any computer aided design (CAD) software by using B-Spline curves to fit the points. An example is demonstrated by writing a Chinese compound word 'the fortune and treasure are coming' to show the process. Finally, a RP model is fabricated to show various applications for the products in Chinese calligraphy pattern. By this research, the gap between the Chinese calligraphy in handicraft and digital virtual design can be realized. More usefully, with this research the aesthetic aspects in the characters can be preserved.

Reverse Recognition of the Digital Images for Chinese Cultural Relics

“…(1) original model, (2) hardware platform and pre-processing, (3) data formatting, and (4) model construction method [1]. The current study uses ancient relic images through automatic matting, grey level image edge detection, and conversion along with other image processing techniques to carry out reverse recognition.…”

Multimedia courseware for teaching of rapid prototyping systems

“…In each industry, several examples are discussed to give the users greater understanding on the benefit of RP. The creative area, for instance, has RP to be used in jewellery (Chua and Gay, 1991; Lee et al , 1992), coin mint and tableware (Chua et al , 1993) industries as well as architecture and arts (Wang et al , 2006).…”

Acrylic-based hydrogel phantom forin vitroultrasound contrast agent characterization

“…The key point of RP is the direct link between the computer-aided-design (CAD) model and the solid object, produced in few hours, suggesting that tailormade or single functional parts could be fabricated, for example, for prosthetic applications in very a short time (Greco et al 2001, Esposito et al 2005, Licciulli et al 2005. In recent years, in many fields ranging from mechanical to medical applications, the combination of RP and reverse engineering (RE) are considered effective tools for product design and development (Wang et al 2006). *Corresponding author.…”