In this work, we propose a novel framework named Coconditional Autoencoding Adversarial Networks (CocoAAN) for Chinese font learning, which jointly learns a generation network and two encoding networks of different feature domains using an adversarial process. The encoding networks map the glyph images into style and content features respectively via the pairwise substitution optimization strategy, and the generation network maps these two kinds of features to glyph samples. Together with a discriminative network conditioned on the extracted features, our framework succeeds in producing realistic-looking Chinese glyph images flexibly. Unlike previous models relying on the complex segmentation of Chinese components or strokes, our model can "parse" structures in an unsupervised way, through which the content feature representation of each character is captured. Experiments demonstrate our framework has a powerful generalization capacity to other unseen fonts and characters.
@cite_7 invoked an intercross pairwise scheme to infer the common style feature, which takes advantage of the implicit style co-sharing nature of different fonts. But for the character content feature they used a manual encoding method based on the radical assembling knowledge of each character, which could hardly be generalized to sophisticated structure as the stroke-based methods. Moreover, the generated samples are often blurry, which should attribute to the disadvantage of its varitional auto-encoder (VAE) mechanism as it uses the pixel-wise loss for reconstruction objective.
@cite_7
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An unconstrained end-to-end text localization and recognition method is presented. The method introduces a novel approach for character detection and recognition which combines the advantages of sliding-window and connected component methods. Characters are detected and recognized as image regions which contain strokes of specific orientations in a specific relative position, where the strokes are efficiently detected by convolving the image gradient field with a set of oriented bar filters. Additionally, a novel character representation efficiently calculated from the values obtained in the stroke detection phase is introduced. The representation is robust to shift at the stroke level, which makes it less sensitive to intra-class variations and the noise induced by normalizing character size and positioning. The effectiveness of the representation is demonstrated by the results achieved in the classification of real-world characters using an euclidian nearest-neighbor classifier trained on synthetic data in a plain form. The method was evaluated on a standard dataset, where it achieves state-of-the-art results in both text localization and recognition. An end-to-end real-time text localization and recognition method is presented. Its real-time performance is achieved by posing the character detection and segmentation problem as an efficient sequential selection from the set of Extremal Regions. The ER detector is robust against blur, low contrast and illumination, color and texture variation. In the first stage, the probability of each ER being a character is estimated using features calculated by a novel algorithm in constant time and only ERs with locally maximal probability are selected for the second stage, where the classification accuracy is improved using computationally more expensive features. A highly efficient clustering algorithm then groups ERs into text lines and an OCR classifier trained on synthetic fonts is exploited to label character regions. The most probable character sequence is selected in the last stage when the context of each character is known. The method was evaluated on three public datasets. On the ICDAR 2013 dataset the method achieves state-of-the-art results in text localization; on the more challenging SVT dataset, the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and demonstrates that the proposed pipeline can incorporate additional prior knowledge about the detected text. The proposed method was exploited as the baseline in the ICDAR 2015 Robust Reading competition, where it compares favourably to the state-of-the art. Cross media retrieval engines have gained massive popularity with rapid development of the Internet. Users may perform queries in a corpus consisting of audio, video, and textual information. To make such systems practically possible for large mount of multimedia data, two critical issues must be carefully considered: (a) reduce the storage as much as possible; (b) model the relationship of the heterogeneous media data. Recently academic community have proved that encoding the data into compact binary codes can drastically reduce the storage and computational cost. However, it is still unclear how to integrate multiple information sources properly into the binary code encoding scheme. In this paper, we study the cross media indexing problem by learning the discriminative hashing functions to map the multi-view datum into a shared hamming space. Not only meaningful within-view similarity is required to be preserved, we also incorporate the between-view correlations into the encoding scheme, where we map the similar points close together and push apart the dissimilar ones. To this end, we propose a novel hashing algorithm called Iterative Multi-View Hashing (IMVH) by taking these information into account simultaneously. To solve this joint optimization problem efficiently, we further develop an iterative scheme to deal with it by using a more flexible quantization model. In particular, an optimal alignment is learned to maintain the between-view similarity in the encoding scheme. And the binary codes are obtained by directly solving a series of binary label assignment problems without continuous relaxation to avoid the unnecessary quantization loss. In this way, the proposed algorithm not only greatly improves the retrieval accuracy but also performs strong robustness. An extensive set of experiments clearly demonstrates the superior performance of the proposed method against the state-of-the-art techniques on both multimodal and unimodal retrieval tasks. Neural style transfer has drawn broad attention in recent years. However, most existing methods aim to explicitly model the transformation between different styles, and the learned model is thus not generalizable to new styles. We here attempt to separate the representations for styles and contents, and propose a generalized style transfer network consisting of style encoder, content encoder, mixer and decoder. The style encoder and content encoder are used to extract the style and content factors from the style reference images and content reference images, respectively. The mixer employs a bilinear model to integrate the above two factors and finally feeds it into a decoder to generate images with target style and content. To separate the style features and content features, we leverage the conditional dependence of styles and contents given an image. During training, the encoder network learns to extract styles and contents from two sets of reference images in limited size, one with shared style and the other with shared content. This learning framework allows simultaneous style transfer among multiple styles and can be deemed as a special multi-task' learning scenario. The encoders are expected to capture the underlying features for different styles and contents which is generalizable to new styles and contents. For validation, we applied the proposed algorithm to the Chinese Typeface transfer problem. Extensive experiment results on character generation have demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of our method.