Woodblock image decomposition of Chinese new year paintings

摘要

Woodblock printed Chinese new year (WNY) painting has been a popular art form in Chinese folk culture. To make a WNY painting involves carving images on woodblocks and printing colors using woodblocks. Although thousands of WNY paintings were preserved, the ten-year national survey reveals that a great number of woodblocks were damaged or lost. In this paper, we study a novel problem of decomposing woodblock images from WNY paintings, which currently requires a tremendous amount of manual labor. We also find that the state-of-the-art methods of natural image segmentation generate poor results in our application. Instead of using sophisticated schemes, we develop a simple yet robust decomposition approach, which contains the extraction of line block image and the separation of color block images. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through both quantitative evaluation and visual quality comparison with six state-of-the-art methods on multiple WNY paintings.