SCFont: Structure-Guided Chinese Font Generation via Deep Stacked Networks

Abstract

Automatic generation of Chinese fonts that consist of large numbers of glyphs with complicated structures is now still a challenging and ongoing problem in areas of AI and Computer Graphics (CG). Traditional CG-based methods typically rely heavily on manual interventions, while recentlypopularized deep learning-based end-to-end approaches often obtain synthesis results with incorrect structures and/or serious artifacts. To address those problems, this paper proposes a structure-guided Chinese font generation system, SCFont, by using deep stacked networks. The key idea is to integrate the domain knowledge of Chinese characters with deep generative networks to ensure that high-quality glyphs with correct structures can be synthesized. More specifically, we first apply a CNN model to learn how to transfer the writing trajectories with separated strokes in the reference font style into those in the target style. Then, we train another CNN model learning how to recover shape details on the contour for synthesized writing trajectories. Experimental results validate the superiority of the proposed SCFont compared to the state of the art in both visual and quantitative assessments.