This paper addresses the automatic generation of a typographic font from a subset of characters. Specifically, we use a subset of a typographic font to extrapolate additional characters. Consequently, we obtain a complete font containing a number of characters sufficient for daily use. The automated generation of Japanese fonts is in high demand because a Japanese font requires over 1,000 characters. Unfortunately, professional typographers create most fonts, resulting in significant financial and time investments for font generation. The proposed method can be a great aid for font creation because designers do not need to create the majority of the characters for a new font. The proposed method uses strokes from given samples for font generation. The strokes, from which we construct characters, are extracted by exploiting a character skeleton dataset. This study makes three main contributions: a novel method of extracting strokes from characters, which is applicable to both standard fonts and their variations; a fully automated approach for constructing characters; and a selection method for sample characters. We demonstrate our proposed method by generating 2,965 characters in 47 fonts. Objective and subjective evaluations verify that the generated characters are similar to handmade characters.
Character component decomposition is a crucial technique for the methods in this category. However, most use naive decomposition that rely on spatial relationships @cite_12 @cite_25 @cite_7 @cite_29 @cite_33 or special devices @cite_4 @cite_11 . It is difficult to extract components when they are connected or decorated. To the best of our knowledge, the method in @cite_6 is the only method that is applicable to characters in fonts with decorations. Saito applied a patch transform @cite_30 to samples and generated alphabetical characters in wide range of fonts @cite_6 . However, the generated results did not meet the criteria for practical use. In this paper, we propose an adaptive active contour model for component extraction. With the proposed method, we can obtain natural character strokes even in decorated characters.
@cite_30 @cite_4 @cite_33 @cite_7 @cite_29 @cite_6 @cite_25 @cite_12 @cite_11
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This paper presents a novel preprocessing method based on mathematical morphology techniques to improve the subsequent thresholding quality of raw degraded word images. The raw degraded word images contain undesirable shapes called critical shadows on the background that cause noise in binary images. This noise constitutes obstacles to posterior segmentation of characters. Direct application of a thresholding method produces inadequate binary versions of these degraded word images. Our preprocessing method called Shadow Location and Lightening (SL*L) adaptively, accurately and without manual fine-tuning of parameters locates these critical shadows on grayscale degraded images using morphological operations, and lightens them before applying eventual thresholding process. In this way, enhanced binary images without unpredictable and inappropriate noise can be provided to subsequent segmentation of characters. Then, adequate binary characters can be segmented and extracted as input data to optical character recognition (OCR) applications saving computational effort and increasing recognition rate. The proposed method is experimentally tested with a set of several raw degraded images extracted from real photos acquired by unsophisticated imaging systems. A qualitative analysis of experimental results led to conclusions that the thresholding result quality was significantly improved with the proposed preprocessing method. Also, a quantitative evaluation using a testing data of 1194 degraded word images showed the essentiality and effectiveness of the proposed preprocessing method to increase segmentation and recognition rates of their characters. Furthermore, an advantage of the proposed method is that Otsu's method as a simple and easily implementable global thresholding technique can be sufficient to reducing computational load. This work proposes a novel adaptive approach for character segmentation and feature vector extraction from seriously degraded images. An algorithm based on the histogram automatically detects fragments and merges these fragments before segmenting the fragmented characters. A morphological thickening algorithm automatically locates reference lines for separating the overlapped characters. A morphological thinning algorithm and the segmentation cost calculation automatically determine the baseline for segmenting the connected characters. Basically, our approach can detect fragmented, overlapped, or connected character and adaptively apply for one of three algorithms without manual fine-tuning. Seriously degraded images as license plate images taken from real world are used in the experiments to evaluate the robustness, the flexibility and the effectiveness of our approach. The system approach output data as feature vectors keep useful information more accurately to be used as input data in an automatic pattern recognition system. 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. The maximally stable extremal region (MSER) method has been widely used to extract character candidates, but because of its requirement for maximum stability, high text detection performance is difficult to obtain. To overcome this problem, we propose a robust character candidate extraction method that performs ER tree construction, sub-path partitioning, sub-path pruning, and character candidate selection sequentially. Then, we use the AdaBoost trained character classifier to verify the extracted character candidates. Then, we use heuristics to refine the classified character candidates and group the refined character candidates into text regions according to their geometric adjacency and color similarity. We also apply the proposed text detection method to two different color channels C r and C b and obtain the final detection result by combining the detection results on the three different channels. The proposed text detection method on ICDAR 2013 dataset achieved 8 , 1 , and 4 improvements in recall rate, precision rate and f-score, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art methods.