Visual analysis of inscriptions in the Tang Dynasty: a case study on the calligraphy style of Wang Xizhi

The art of inscriptions is one of the most important components of the glorious ancient culture in China. It is an essential method not only for ancients to record history and disseminate culture but also to provide original written and pictorial records for subsequent generations to learn about ancient Chinese culture. However, the art of inscriptions and calligraphy is currently not widely available because of its professional chirography, style and composition. Moreover, traditional calligraphy exhibitions cannot provide the public with an interactive and intuitive way to present the features of Chinese characters, such as stroke thickness. Therefore, in this paper, we present an interactive visual system to support the public in understanding and appreciating the calligraphic style of the inscriptions of the Tang Dynasty and the evolutionary path of the calligraphic style of Wang Xizhi. We first employ image processing technology to extract calligraphy features. Then, we help users explore the development of calligraphy from the spatial-temporal dimension and analyze the similarity between the works at two granularity levels: Chinese character structure and the works’ style. Furthermore, the system also provides a metaphorical visualization method to enhance the concretization of calligraphic appreciation. Case studies and comprehensive evaluation demonstrate the usability of our proposed visual analysis system of the calligraphic style of the inscriptions in the Tang Dynasty.