Handwritten font generation is important for preserving cultural heritage and creating personalized designs. It adds an authentic and expressive touch to printed materials, making them visually appealing and establishing a stronger connection with the audience. This paper aims to design a framework for generating handwritten fonts in the Gujarati script, mimicking the variation of human handwriting. The proposed font generation model consists of a learning phase and a generation phase. In the learning phase, Gujarati scripts are analyzed, and rules for designing each character are formulated. This ruleset involves the concatenation of strokes in a stroke-based manner, ensuring visual consistency in the resulting glyphs. The generation phase involves the user providing a small subset of characters, and the system automatically generates the remaining character glyphs based on extracted strokes and learned rules, resulting in handwritten Gujarati fonts. The resulting character glyphs are converted into an open-type font using the FontForge tool, making them compatible with any Gujarati editor. Both subjective and objective evaluations are conducted to assess the synthesized images and fonts. Subjective evaluation through user studies provides feedback on quality and visual appeal, achieving an overall accuracy of 84.84%. Notably, eleven characters demonstrated a success ratio above 90%. Objective evaluation using an existing recognition system achieves an overall accuracy of 84.28% in OCR evaluation. Notably, fifteen characters had a success ratio of 80% or higher.
In a multilingual country like India where 12 different official scripts are in use, automatic identification of handwritten script facilitates many important applications such as automatic transcription of multilingual documents, searching for documents on the web/digital archives containing a particular script and for the selection of script specific Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system in a multilingual environment. In this paper, we propose a robust method towards identifying scripts from the handwritten documents at text line-level. The recognition is based upon features extracted u…
A considerable amount of success has been achieved in developing monolingual OCR systems for Indic scripts. But in a country like India, where multi-script scenario is prevalent, identifying scripts beforehand becomes obligatory. In this paper, we present the significance of Gabor wavelets filters in extracting directional energy and entropy distributions for 11 official handwritten scripts namely, Bangla, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurumukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and Roman. The experimentation is conducted at block level based on a quad-tree decomposition approach and eva…
Cooperative Madianet Innovation Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学Madianet协同创新中心）；Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories（三菱电机研究实验室）；PingAn Technology US Research Lab（平安科技美国研究实验室）；Huawei Technologies Noah’s Ark Lab（华为技术诺亚方舟实验室）
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 stro…
Generating synthetic images is an art which emulates the natural process of image generation in a closest possible manner. In this work, we exploit such a framework for data generation in handwritten domain. We render synthetic data using open source fonts and incorporate data augmentation schemes. As part of this work, we release 9M synthetic handwritten word image corpus which could be useful for training deep network architectures and advancing the performance in handwritten word spotting and recognition tasks.
Handwriting of Chinese has long been an important skill in East Asia. However, automatic generation of handwritten Chinese characters poses a great challenge due to the large number of characters. Various machine learning techniques have been used to recognize Chinese characters, but few works have studied the handwritten Chinese character generation problem, especially with unpaired training data. In this work, we formulate the Chinese handwritten character generation as a problem that learns a mapping from an existing printed font to a personalized handwritten style. We further propose Dense…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Huawei Cloud AI（华为云人工智能部门）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Automatic font generation remains a challenging research issue due to the large amounts of characters with complicated structures. Typically, only a few samples can serve as the style/content reference (termed few-shot learning), which further increases the difficulty to preserve local style patterns or detailed glyph structures. We investigate the drawbacks of previous studies and find that a coarse-grained discriminator is insufficient for supervising a font generator. To this end, we propose a novel Component-Aware Module (CAM), which supervises the generator to decouple content and style a…
Shantou University（汕头大学）；Helsing AI（赫尔辛AI）；AllRead MLT（AllRead机器学习技术公司）；Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）；omni:us（omni:us公司）
Handwritten Text Recognition has achieved an impressive performance in public benchmarks. However, due to the high inter- and intra-class variability between handwriting styles, such recognizers need to be trained using huge volumes of manually labeled training data. To alleviate this labor-consuming problem, synthetic data produced with TrueType fonts has been often used in the training loop to gain volume and augment the handwriting style variability. However, there is a significant style bias between synthetic and real data which hinders the improvement of recognition performance. To deal w…
Arabic text recognition is a challenging task because of the cursive nature of Arabic writing system, its joint writing scheme, the large number of ligatures and many other challenges. Deep Learning DL models achieved significant progress in numerous domains including computer vision and sequence modelling. This paper presents a model that can recognize Arabic text that was printed using multiple font types including fonts that mimic Arabic handwritten scripts. The proposed model employs a hybrid DL network that can recognize Arabic printed text without the need for character segmentation. The…
Stroke is the basic element of Chinese character and stroke extraction has been an important and long-standing endeavor. Existing stroke extraction methods are often handcrafted and highly depend on domain expertise due to the limited training data. Moreover, there are no standardized benchmarks to provide a fair comparison between different stroke extraction methods, which, we believe, is a major impediment to the development of Chinese character stroke understanding and related tasks. In this work, we present the first public available Chinese Character Stroke Extraction (CCSE) benchmark, wi…
