HiGAN+: Handwriting Imitation GAN with Disentangled Representations

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Humans remain far better than machines at learning, where humans require fewer examples to learn new concepts and can use those concepts in richer ways. Take handwriting as an example, after learning from very limited handwriting scripts, a person can easily imagine what the handwritten texts would like with other arbitrary textual contents (even for unseen words or texts). Moreover, humans can also hallucinate to imitate calligraphic styles from just a single reference handwriting sample (that even have never seen before). Humans can do such hallucinations, perhaps because they can learn to disentangle the textual contents and calligraphic styles from handwriting images. Inspired by this, we propose a novel handwriting imitation generative adversarial network (HiGAN+) for realistic handwritten text synthesis based on disentangled representations. The proposed HiGAN+ can achieve a precise one-shot handwriting style transfer by introducing the writer-specific auxiliary loss and contextual loss, and it also attains a good global & local consistency by refining local details of synthetic handwriting images. Extensive experiments, including human evaluations, on the benchmark dataset validate our superiority in terms of visual quality, scalability, compactness, and style transferability compared with the state-of-the-art GANs for handwritten text synthesis.