In this paper, we investigate the Chinese font synthesis problem and propose a Pyramid Embedded Generative Adversarial Network (PEGAN) to automatically generate Chinese character images. The PEGAN consists of one generator and one discriminator. The generator is built using one encoder-decoder structure with cascaded refinement connections and mirror skip connections. The cascaded refinement connections embed a multiscale pyramid of downsampled original input into the encoder feature maps of different layers, and multi-scale feature maps from the encoder are connected to the corresponding feature maps in the decoder to make the mirror skip connections. Through combining the generative adversarial loss, pixel-wise loss, category loss and perceptual loss, the generator and discriminator can be trained alternately to synthesize character images. In order to verify the effectiveness of our proposed PEGAN, we first build one evaluation set, in which the characters are selected according to their stroke number and frequency of use, and then use both qualitative and quantitative metrics to measure the performance of our model comparing with the baseline method. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model, it shows the potential to automatically extend small font banks into complete ones.
Stroke is the basic unit of Chinese characters. The stroke extraction based methods are the dominant way to generate font in early stage. In @cite_7 , the strokes of both source font and target font are first extracted. Then autoencoder and self-organizing maps are adopted to cluster the extracted strokes into 100 different groups. Finally, new characters of target font are generated by stroke replacement. In @cite_8 , one automatic extrapolation method for small font is proposed. The strokes of characters from one small subset are first extracted to form a stroke pool. In addition, one transformation matrix between source font and target font is learnt by the corresponding relationship between their skeletons. The missing target characters are generated based on strokes and transformed skeletons. This kind of methods mainly rely on stroke extraction. Moreover, the stroke extraction of calligraphic font is still one challenging problem.
@cite_7 @cite_8
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Given the large number and complexity of Chinese characters, pattern matching based on structural decomposition and analysis is believed to be necessary and essential to off-line character recognition. The paper proposes a model of stroke extraction for Chinese characters. One problem for stroke extraction is how to extract primary strokes. Another major problem is to solve the segmentation ambiguities at intersection points. We use the degree information and the stroke continuation property to tackle these two problems. The proposed model can be used to extract strokes from both printed and handwritten character images. The existing method of contour-based font description is difficult to meet the personalized need for various style font generations because of the large size of Chinese character set. In this paper, we propose a novel glyph description method which treats the Chinese character as a constitution of the stable part called "structure" and the mutable part called "style". The structures of all characters are clustered by an improved K-Medoids method to guide the following generation of sample set which covers all kinds of style information of the whole character set. The result of cluster procedure indicates that radicals are bottlenecks for the reduction of sample set due to the low repetition rate in all characters. To address this problem, we present the radicals as a set of stroke-to-stroke layout structures, and render them from these substructures available in the sample set. Experiment results shows that the substitution enables us to learn the style information from a small set of sample characters (less than 10 of total amount) and generate the rest with the similar writing style. with English, and they are not suitable for Chinese character synthesis. In this paper, we propose an unified approach for modeling and synthesizing Chinese characters. Using a three-level hierarchical representation, each character is decomposed into basic components, which forms the stroke database and radical database. In the synthesis process, we use a wavelet-based approach to select proper strokes and radicals, and some aesthetic constraints are defined based on the relationships between components, then genetic algorithm is employed to search for the optimal results which best match the aesthetic constraints. Experimental results demonstrates the effectiveness of our method. Machine learning techniques have been successfully applied to Chinese character recognition; nonetheless, automatic generation of stylized Chinese handwriting remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose Stroke-Bank, a novel approach to automating personalized Chinese handwriting generation. We use a semi-supervised algorithm to construct a dictionary of component mappings from a small seeding set. Unlike previous work, our approach does not require human supervision in stroke extraction or knowledge of the structure of Chinese characters. This dictionary is used to generate handwriting that preserves stylistic variations, including cursiveness and spatial layout of strokes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model by a survey-based evaluation. The results show that our generated characters are nearly indistinguishable from ground truth handwritings.