Evaluating volatile organic compounds from Chinese traditional handmade paper by SPME-GC/MS

Once printed, books are always accompanied by the smells of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which are continuously emitted not only by inks but also by papers themselves throughout their lives. Although the VOCs from papers may bring mild discomfort to readers, they are considered as very important factors that feature the degradation of papers and show potential applications in cultural relic appraisal. In this study, an analytical approach based on solid phase microextraction combined with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (SPME-GC/MS) was proposed for the evaluation of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by Chinese traditional handmade papers. The VOCs evaluations and artificial aging processes were both applied to recent-made papers and naturally aged papers from a traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting scroll (collected by the National Museum of China). To be noticed, a large number of aliphatic acids, aldehydes, ketones, furan derivatives, benzene series and terpenoid substances indicated that the VOCs signals not only reveal the degradation of paper but also tentatively reflect the storage environment along hundreds of years ago. The semi-quantitative evaluation of markers indicated that the historical paper is under a serious degradation due to the high capacity it releases. Our results provided a path way to get the degradation information of ancient paintings as well as potential realistic applications such as the conservation of paper-based relics and the environmental protection in libraries and museums.

Exploiting Serialized Fine-Grained Action Recognition Using WiFi Sensing

Gestures serve an important role in enabling natural interactions with computing devices, and they form an important part of everyday nonverbal communication. In increasingly many application scenarios of gesture interaction, such as gesture-based authentication, calligraphy, sketching, and even artistic expression, not only are the underlying gestures complex and consist of multiple strokes but also the correctness of the gestures depends on the order at which the strokes are performed. In this paper, we present WiCG, an innovative and novel WiFi sensing approach for capturing and providing feedback on stroke order. Our approach tracks the user’s hand movement during writing and exploits this information in combination with statistical methods and machine learning techniques to infer what characters have been written and at which stroke order. We consider Chinese calligraphy as our use case as the resulting gestures are highly complex, and their assessment depends on the correct stroke order. We develop a set of analyses and algorithms to overcome many issues of this challenging task. We have conducted extensive experiments and user studies to evaluate our approach. Experimental results show that our approach is highly effective in identifying the written characters and their written stroke order. We show that our approach can adapt to different deployment environments and user patterns.

Application and Value of Chinese Calligraphy in Visual Design of Anti-Smoking Advertisements from the Perspective of Life Aesthetics

Anti-smoking advertisements have great importance of value orientation and enlightening function, the visual design of anti-smoking advertisements can not only guide the formation of public health values through visual communication, but also promote the integration of economic and social benefits between media and tobacco enterprises. As an important category of visual language, Chinese calligraphy can form the natural fusion together with the linguistic features of visual design to be widely used in design practice. Being affected by the aestheticization of daily life at different levels, the functional fit between calligraphy "writing" and design "transmission", and the aesthetic contemplation on calligraphy "style" and design "meaning transmission", both become the new form for the aestheticization of daily life. From the perspective of life aesthetics, with the relationship between calligraphy art and contemporary visual design to be re-examined, in terms of the design of anti-smoking advertisements, calligraphy has realized the creation and transcendence of seeing "the ideal" from "the existence" in the application of visual design, thus forming the intention of reconstructing people's life value system in the current cultural context with "beauty", which is just the "human-oriented" design.

Cubic Curve Fitting Method in Reconstruction of Chinese Calligraphy Outline

Curve plays a significant role in CAGD and brings the good impact of computers to manufacturing industries in designing 2 and 3-dimensional shapes and objects. Reconstruction of Chinese calligraphy outline based on the actual character is presented in this paper. Chinese calligraphy is the stylized artistic writings of Chinese characters. It is believed that this writing may help to express the feelings and ideas of the writers, which are difficult to be described. The shapes, smooth lines, and perfect curves are among the important qualities which are particularly emphasized in selecting good Chinese calligraphy. The Cubic B-Spline, Cubic Trigonometric Spline, and Cubic Trigonometric Bezier were used to generate the curves. The factors that have influenced the effects of the curves modifications were examined based on the changes of control polygon and the values of shape parameter. The fastest approach was then chosen by measuring the processing time required to construct the complete design. Results show the Cubic Trigonometric Bezier curve produced the closest curves to the control polygon, accurate to the actual character with λ = 1 and CPU time taken is 2.032 seconds. This is followed by Cubic Trigonometric Spline and Cubic B-Spline.

Effects of Different Finger Grips and Arm Positions on the Performance of Manipulating the Chinese Brush in Chinese Adolescents

This study aimed to investigate the effects of finger grip and wrist position on Chinese calligraphy handwriting (CCH). Thirty participants were recruited in the study and asked to manipulate the Chinese brush using two finger grip methods (three-finger grip and five-finger grip) and two wrist positions (suspended wrist and raised wrist). Three experimental writing tasks were applied to investigate writing stability, agility, and hand–eye coordination, and to evaluate the completion time (s), area of error (cm2), and error times. Subjective responses (arm aching level, ease of grip, exertion level, and comfort) regarding the four combinations of Chinese brush manipulation were measured. The results indicated significantly better performance with the three-finger grip for the stability and agility tests, and with the five-finger grip for the hand–eye coordination task. Using the suspended wrist position for CCH allowed better agility and hand–eye coordination than the raised wrist position. In consideration of the results of the four operational combinations, the three-finger grip with a suspended wrist position demonstrated the best performance in both objective and subjective measurements. It is recommended for application in the early learning stage. These findings can be considered when teaching Chinese brushes for beginners of CCH in schools.