Complete font generation of Chinese characters in personal handwriting style

Abstract

Since a complete Chinese font has typically several thousand or more Chinese characters and symbols, and most of them are much more complicated than English alphabets, it takes a lot of time and efforts for even professional font engineers to create a Chinese font. Although several attempts had been made to synthesize Chinese characters from strokes and components, it is still not easy to synthesize so many Chinese characters at one time. In this paper, we present an easy and fast solution for an ordinary user to create a Chinese font of his or her handwriting style. We adopt the approach: to synthesize Chinese characters using components extracted from the user's handwritings. In the preprocessing phase, we built a Web interface for crowds to label the positions and sizes of components of every Chinese character in the target character set. The standard Kai font was selected as a reference. We also devised an algorithm to find a small subset of Chinese characters having all required components to synthesize other Chinese characters. To create a personal handwriting font, with commonly-used 3,914 traditional Chinese characters, a user only has to handwrite 400 or so Chinese characters on a pad. One character by one character, our system can track every stroke, recognize and extract components from the user's handwritings. Then, every target Chinese character is synthesized from the extracted components, by placing them properly according to their position and size information. The experiment results show that although manually fine-tune is still required for few synthesized Chinese characters, users can create a Chinese font of their personal handwriting styles more easily and quickly.