北京大学计算机科学技术研究所郭婷,北京大学计算机科学技术研究所

The research direction of Graphics and Image Processing & Digital Publishing Applications originated from professor Wang Xuan’s research achievements, which started in 1978 as a state-funded project codenamed as Project-748, and aimed at fast compressing and recovering of the complicated Chinese font glyphs. With the support of the project, the digital publishing system was successfully developed and obtained wide applications, triggering the technical evolution in the publishing industry.

In the following forty years, ICST has been continually carrying out academic research and technical innovations, actively promoting industrial applications, and obtaining rich research achievements: hundreds of academic papers have been published in prestigious academic journals and conferences including SIGGRAPH, IJCV, IEEE TIP, CVPR, IJCAI; more than a hundred of invention patents have been granted including tens of international patents; application systems developed based on the research achievements in this direction have been widely used not only in China but also in more than 30 foreign countries; For the research achievements in this direction, ICST have been awarded respectively for two times with the first prize of "National Scientific and Technological Progress Achievement" and the "Top Ten China Scientific and Technological Achievements". Other prestigious prizes they have been awarded in this research direction also include Major Innovation of Information Technology Industry, and Ten Major Scientific and Technological Progress of China's Colleges and Universities.

This research direction mainly focuses on the academic research and industrial developments on Graphics and Image processing & Digital Publishing. Specifically, based on the industrial requirements of digital publishing applications, we carry out research on Glyph Computing, Digital Image Processing, Computer Graphics, Digital Publishing & Printing, etc. Here are more details:

·   Glyph Computing:

-     Automatic generation of Chinese Handwriting Fonts: stroke/radical extraction, font recognition, font aesthetic evaluation, handwriting style modeling, character shape synthesis, and a system capable of automatically generating a complete Chinese font library with a small number of given handwriting samples.

-      Intelligent CAD for high-quality Chinese fonts: intelligent glyph editing, automatic style morphing, and glyph synthesizing.

Fig 2.1 Hifont: a font editing system

-          Vectorization and compression: vectorization of character contour, high-quality compression and quick recovering of glyph.

Fig 2.2 Flexifont: a web based font generation system

·  Digital Image Processing Techniques for Publishing and Printing:

-          High-speed raster image processing techniques: support data formats including PostScript, PDF, PPML/VDX, etc., and many other variable data formats in the standard of industry; analysis of constant data and variable data, rasterization, real-time page assembling, device controlling and driving.

-          High-speed image processing techniques for inkjet imaging: inkjet imaging quality enhancement, color management and halftone for inkjet imaging, character resolution enhancement, high-speed image transmission, distributed image processing.

·    Computer Graphics:

-          Graphics processing techniques: Graphics sampling techniques and theories, digital geometric processing, image based rendering and modeling, general-purposes graphics processing unit (GPGPU), etc.

-          3D shape analysis, retrieval and modeling techniques: Investigate preprocessing, shape measurement, feature extraction, shape matching, point set registration, quick modeling techniques for 3D models, and achieve rapid and accurate retrieval for large-scale 3D models and data-driven intelligent & flexible 3D modeling.

·    Digital Publishing and Printing:

-          Procedure-controlling techniques for digital publishing and printing: parallel control of a set of processing nodes, load-balancing techniques among a group of RIP clusters and devices, etc.

-          On-demand printing and cloud-based intelligent printing production techniques: large-scale, high-reliable, high-parallel document parallel processing framework, parallel storage and rapid retrieval for numerous data, digital right protection for printing resource.

-          Digital jet printing techniques: conduct research on high-speed digital jet printing techniques.

·   Major Research Achievements:

-          Vectorized font products we created have been widely utilized in about 90% domestic newspapers, presses, publishers, and about 80% Chinese newspapers and overseas journals. The TrueType font libraries we designed using compressing and Hint techniques have been applied in mobile phones, navigators, vehicle electronic devices, etc., due to its small storage requirement, high-quality appearance, and appropriation for portable devices.

-          Our quick producing and automatic generation system for Chinese handwriting fonts makes it easy for people to possess Chinese handwriting fonts in their own personalized styles, and significantly enhance efficiency and reduce costs for producing high-quality Chinese handwriting fonts and their compressed versions. Relevant techniques have been employed in the generation and development of practical font products and start making significant economic benefits and social influences.

-          We developed the rapid Raster Image Processor (RIP), from first-generation hardware rasterization system to eighth-generation rapid rasterization processing software, which can do the precise rasterization processing for many data formats including PostScript, PDF, PPML/VDX, XPS, etc. and convert them into printable halftone image format. The system has been widely used in the press industry.

-          We developed the advanced color printing control system. The advanced color printing control techniques have been provided for many international device companies and widely utilized around the whole world.

-          We developed the "Digital work-flow management system" for large and medium scale publishing companies, which not only has been applied in areas of newspaper publishing, book publishing, printing service, etc., in China to significantly improve production efficiency, but has also been exported overseas, making numerous economic benefits.

-          We developed various digital inkjet printing systems, which fully explore our superiorities in inkjet quality optimization and rapid data processing. The systems have state-of-the-art (in China) performance and have been widely utilized in the print-on-demand and personalized printing services for rapid variable data, tags, books, etc.

-          The print-on-demand and intelligent manufacturing cloud platform systems we developed based on the digital publishing techniques utilize a special digital film data format, which possesses efficient sheet data compression, copyright protection for publishing resorts, and many other functions and thus successfully resolves the coherent problem of contents for off-site printing. Those systems have been widely used in domestic presses and newspapers.

-          We developed Chinese batch processing and interactive book composing software, interactive magazine composing software, Japanese character processing and magazine composing software, which are able to process Chinese, English, Japanese characters, charts, graphics, images and other elements. Those systems have been utilized in more than 90% domestic newspapers and presses, and more than 50% overseas Chinese newspapers. The Japanese character processing and newspaper composing software has also been adopted in dozens of newspapers in Japan.