An Automatic Chinese Character Maltifont Generating System

Abstract

In computerized Chinese character printing, it is infeasible to use the fully-formed character approach since there are about 8,000 Chinese characters in common use. Therefore, dot-matrix printing with a large dictionary of binary images of Chinese characters stored in memory is commonly used. To generate these Chinese character patterns in the dot-matrix form by manual operation is tedious. A better approach is to apply image processing techniques to automatically convert the image of a character into its corresponding dot-matrix pattern. We developed a system that can automatically generate a Chinese character multifont. This system includes image processing and CAD subsystems. Each input picture, consisting of about 100 Chinese characters, is scanned by a scanner. The digitized line-scanned image is processed by the image processing subsystem to form the Chinese characters by a dot matrix. The modules of the image processing subsystem include noise reducer, text detector, adaptive threshold, slicer, and size corrector. Due to the effect of quantization error, there are some defects in these digitized Chinese characters. The CAD subsystem is used to trim these characters. The modules of the CAD subsystem include radical extractor, radical classifier , radical generator, radical copier, stroke extractor, and stroke trimmer. This system can automatically generate Chinese characters in a wide range of resolutions ( 24x24 to 240x240 ) and in any specified font, such as Sung style, Ming style, Formal style, Running style, and Script style of Chinese characters. Using the proposed system, we have generated about 160,000 Chinese characters, which consist of five styles in four dif-ferent resolutions. The advantages of this system are time saving, cost saving and high quality.