A Computational Approach to Digital Chinese Painting and Calligraphy (Advanced Topics in Science and Technology in China)

"A Computational Approach to Digital Chinese Painting and Calligraphy" is a technical book on computer science and its applications in the arts. It focuses on Oriental digital arts, in particular Chinese arts and painting, offering a multi-disciplinary treatment from the angles of computer graphics, interactive techniques, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. The book also discusses the unique difficulties and challenges of using the computer to produce Oriental arts, including research results by the authors and their lessons and engineering experiences behind these efforts.

Songhua Xu is a computer scientist of Zhejiang University and Yale University, as well as an honorary researcher of the University of Hong Kong. Francis C.M. Lau is Professor at the University of Hong Kong where he leads the Systems Research Group in the Department of Computer Science. Yunhe Pan is Professor of Computer Science at Zhejiang University as well as Deputy President of Chinese Academy of Engineering.

From the reviews:

"This book is quite innovative in its perspective of how the brushstrokes necessary for Chinese calligraphy can be traced in paintings. ... the authors use the enthusiasm for the 2008 Beijing Olympics to encourage spectators to study Chinese arts, too. ... The target audience for this book spans the gamut. ... The authors hope that both the art and science communities will be interested in the book’s topics ... . This is one of the important texts in the current literature on these topics." (Minette Carl, ACM Computing Reviews, September, 2009)