Automatic generation of large-scale handwriting fonts via style learning (SIGGRAPH Asia 2016)

Generating personal handwriting fonts with large amounts of characters is a boring and time-consuming task. Take Chinese fonts as an example, the official standard GB18030-2000 for commercial font products contains 27533 simplified Chinese characters. Consistently and correctly writing out such huge amounts of characters is usually an impossible mission for ordinary people. To solve this problem, we propose a handy system to automatically synthesize personal handwritings for all characters (e.g., Chinese) in the font library by learning style from a small number (as few as 1%) of carefully-selected samples written by an ordinary person. Experiments including Turing tests with 69 participants demonstrate that the proposed system generates high-quality synthesis results which are indistinguishable from original handwritings. Using our system, for the first time the practical handwriting font library in a user’s personal style with arbitrarily large numbers of Chinese characters can be generated automatically.