Latent Style Model: Discovering writing styles for calligraphy works

Chinese calligraphy works is a valuable part of the Chinese culture heritage. More and more calligraphy works images are digitized, preserved and exhibited in digital library. Users always want to appreciate the style-similar works simultaneously. To satisfy their need, calligraphic style representation and browsing calligraphy works by its style are the most important problems to be addressed. This paper proposes calligraphic style representation which is a multinomial probability distribution over visual words, and Latent Style Model to discover the style of calligraphy works and organize the works by style. In our experiments, we evaluated various factors that influence the model, and proved the effectiveness of the style representation and the model. At last, we illustrate the Calligraphic Style Browser to organize and exhibit the resource according to the styles. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.