StrokeBank: Automating Personalized Chinese Handwriting Generation

Abstract

Machine learning techniques have been successfully applied to Chinese character recognition; nonetheless, automatic generation of stylized Chinese handwriting remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose StrokeBank, a novel approach to automating personalized Chinese handwriting generation. We use a semi-supervised algorithm to construct a dictionary of component mappings from a small seeding set. Unlike previous work, our approach does not require human supervision in stroke extraction or knowledge of the structure of Chinese characters. This dictionary is used to generate handwriting that preserves stylistic variations, including cursiveness and spatial layout of strokes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model by a survey-based evaluation. The results show that our generated characters are nearly indistinguishable from ground truth handwritings.