Error Prevention and Concealment for Chinese Calligraphy Based on Block Truncation Coding

Abstract

A considerable amount of calligraphy has been accumulated from past Chinese dynasties. With the arrival of the digital era, this calligraphy is being digitalized. However, when digital representations of the calligraphy are transmitted over a noisy channel, transmission errors usually occur. In this paper, we propose a new error prevention and concealment method for Chinese calligraphy. The basic idea of the method is to extract the image feature from a Chinese calligraphy and use it as the auxiliary information. Next, the auxiliary information is embedded into the BTC-compressed codes of the original image. Therefore, the auxiliary information can be extracted to help with the reconstruction of the errant blocks during the error concealment phase. From our experimental results, the proposed scheme can effectively conceal the errant blocks. Moreover, when comparing our method with related research, the image quality of our proposed method is superior to those of PIR and GSBEC. The superiority is more outstanding when the errant blocks are larger. Therefore, our proposed method is a highly effective error concealment technique for Chinese calligraphy.