Automatic character generation is an appealing solution for new typeface design, especially for Chinese typefaces including over 3700 most commonly-used characters. This task has two main pain points: (i) handwritten characters are usually associated with thin strokes of few information and complex structure which are error prone during deformation; (ii) thousands of characters with various shapes are needed to synthesize based on a few manually designed characters. To solve those issues, we propose a novel convolutional-neural-network-based model with three main techniques: collaborative stroke refinement, using collaborative training strategy to recover the missing or broken strokes; online zoom-augmentation, taking the advantage of the content-reuse phenomenon to reduce the size of training set; and adaptive pre-deformation, standardizing and aligning the characters. The proposed model needs only 750 paired training samples; no pre-trained network, extra dataset resource or labels is needed. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under the practical restriction on handwritten font synthesis.
Preserving the content consistency is important in font synthesis task. From A to Z'' assigned each Latin alphabet a one-hot label into the network to constrain the content @cite_23 . Similarly, SA-VAE @cite_13 embedded a pre-trained Chinese character recognition network @cite_15 @cite_7 into the framework to provide a correct content label. SA-VAE also embedded 133-bits coding denoting the structure content-reuse knowledge of inputs, which must rely on the extra labeling related to structure and content beforehand. In order to synthesize multiple font, zi2zi @cite_16 utilized a one-hot category embedding. Similarly, DCFont @cite_26 involved a pre-trained 100-class font-classifier in the framework to provide a better style representation. And recently, MC-GAN @cite_27 can synthesize ornamented glyphs from a few examples. However, the generation of Chinese characters are very different from English alphabet no matter in complexity or considerations. EMD @cite_2 is the first model which can achieve good performance on new Chinese font transfer with a few samples, but it does work poorly on handwritten fonts.
@cite_26 @cite_7 @cite_27 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_13
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Building a complete personalized Chinese font library for an ordinary person is a tough task due to the existence of huge amounts of characters with complicated structures. Yet, existing automatic font generation methods still have many drawbacks. To address the problem, this paper proposes an end-to-end learning system, DCFont, to automatically generate the whole GB2312 font library that consists of 6763 Chinese characters from a small number (e.g., 775) of characters written by the user. Our system has two major advantages. On the one hand, the system works in an end-to-end manner, which means that human interventions during offline training and online generating periods are not required. On the other hand, a novel deep neural network architecture is designed to solve the font feature reconstruction and handwriting synthesis problems through adversarial training, which requires fewer input data but obtains more realistic and high-quality synthesis results compared to other deep learning based approaches. Experimental results verify the superiority of our method against the state of the art. This paper proposes an effective segmentation-free approach using a hybrid neural network hidden Markov model (NN-HMM) for offline handwritten Chinese text recognition (HCTR). In the general Bayesian framework, the handwritten Chinese text line is sequentially modeled by HMMs with each representing one character class, while the NN-based classifier is adopted to calculate the posterior probability of all HMM states. The key issues in feature extraction, character modeling, and language modeling are comprehensively investigated to show the effectiveness of NN-HMM framework for offline HCTR. First, a conventional deep neural network (DNN) architecture is studied with a well-designed feature extractor. As for the training procedure, the label refinement using forced alignment and the sequence training can yield significant gains on top of the frame-level cross-entropy criterion. Second, a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) with automatically learned discriminative features demonstrates its superiority to DNN in the HMM framework. Moreover, to solve the challenging problem of distinguishing quite confusing classes due to the large vocabulary of Chinese characters, NN-based classifier should output 19900 HMM states as the classification units via a high-resolution modeling within each character. On the ICDAR 2013 competition task of CASIA-HWDB database, DNN-HMM yields a promising character error rate (CER) of 5.24 by making a good trade-off between the computational complexity and recognition accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, DCNN-HMM can achieve a best published CER of 3.53 . 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. In this work, a new method is proposed to the widely neglected problem of Arabic font recognition, it uses global texture analysis. This method is based on fractal geometry, and the feature extraction does not depend on the document contents. In our method, we take the document as an image containing some specific textures and regard font recognition as texture identification. We have combined both techniques BCD (box counting dimension) and DCD (dilation counting dimension) to obtain the main features. The first expresses texture distribution in 2-D image. The second makes possible to take on the human vision system aspect, since it makes it possible to differentiate one font from another. Both features are expressed in a parametric form; then four features were kept. Experiments are carried out by using 1000 samples of 10 typefaces (each typeface is combined with four sizes). The average recognition rates are of about 96.2 using KNN (K nearest neighbor) and 98 using RBF (radial basic function). Experimental results are also included in the robustness of the method against written size, skew, image degradation (e.g., Gaussian noise) and resolution, and compared with the existing methods. The main advantages of our method are that (1) the dimension of feature vector is very low; (2) the variation sizes of the studied blocks (which are not standardized) are robust; (3) less samples are needed to train the classifier; (4) finally and the most important, is the first attempt to apply and adapt fractal dimensions to font recognition.