Jianwei Zhang

Wei Zhang, Wong Kam-Kwai, Yitian Chen et al.

The study of cultural artifact provenance, tracing ownership and preservation, holds significant importance in archaeology and art history. Modern technology has advanced this field, yet challenges persist, including recognizing evidence from diverse sources, integrating sociocultural context, and enhancing interactive automation for comprehensive provenance analysis. In collaboration with art historians, we examined the handscroll, a traditional Chinese painting form that provides a rich source of historical data and a unique opportunity to explore history through cultural artifacts. We present a three-tiered methodology encompassing artifact, contextual, and provenance levels, designed to create a "Biography" for handscroll. Our approach incorporates the application of image processing techniques and language models to extract, validate, and augment elements within handscroll using various cultural heritage databases. To facilitate efficient analysis of non-contiguous extracted elements, we have developed a distinctive layout. Additionally, we introduce ScrollTimes, a visual analysis system tailored to support the three-tiered analysis of handscroll, allowing art historians to interactively create biographies tailored to their interests. Validated through case studies and expert interviews, our approach offers a window into history, fostering a holistic understanding of handscroll provenance and historical significance.

Wei Zhang, Jian-Wei Zhang, Kam Kwai Wong et al.

Traditional Chinese Painting (TCP) is an invaluable cultural heritage resource and a unique visual art style. In recent years, increasing interest has been placed on digitalizing TCPs to preserve and revive the culture. The resulting digital copies have enabled the advancement of computational methods for structured and systematic understanding of TCPs. To explore this topic, we conducted an in-depth analysis of 92 pieces of literature. We examined the current use of computer technologies on TCPs from three perspectives, based on numerous conversations with specialists. First, in light of the "Six Principles of Painting" theory, we categorized the articles according to their research focus on artistic elements. Second, we created a four-stage framework to illustrate the purposes of TCP applications. Third, we summarized the popular computational techniques applied to TCPs. The framework also provides insights into potential applications and future prospects, with professional opinion. The list of surveyed publications and related information is available online at https://ca4tcp.com.

Ge Gao, Mikko Lauri, Jianwei Zhang et al.

We propose a new saliency-guided method for generating supervoxels in 3D space. Rather than using an evenly distributed spatial seeding procedure, our method uses visual saliency to guide the process of supervoxel generation. This results in densely distributed, small, and precise supervoxels in salient regions which often contain objects, and larger supervoxels in less salient regions that often correspond to background. Our approach largely improves the quality of the resulting supervoxel segmentation in terms of boundary recall and under-segmentation error on publicly available benchmarks.