Texture mapping based digital rubbing method

The Chinese ancient cliff inscription is very precious historical relics. But they are scattered, lost and damaged with time passing by. The traditional way to preserve it is utilizing manual rubbing to record characters from stone surface. However, this kind of method is arduous and heavy workload, sometimes even dangerous. Furthermore, there is damage to a certain extend to the original stone due to ink and pigment. In this paper, we propose a new method to create digital rubbing by using texture map based method. First, a texture sample bank is produced from scanned manual rubbing image. Second, the images of cliff inscription are acquired, rectified, segmented. Third, the skeleton of the segmented character is extracted through distance transform. Next, the map area is determined from the skeleton and width of the strokes. Then, the texture samples are mapped to the map area. Finally, a digital rubbing image can be created after combing with the background texture that is synthesized from scanned manual rubbing. The experiment results show that our proposed method can create digital rubbing images with similar effects with the manual rubbing.