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Font Generation and Keypoint Ranking for Stroke Order of Chinese Characters by Deep Neural Networks

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Abstract

Determining the stroke order of a Chinese character image is challenging, because there is no explicit representation for image to sequence learning. This paper investigates the approach in Chinese character generation given just a few image samples of a specific font. Then, keypoint extraction for stroke decomposition and learning to rank method are proposed for obtaining stroke order. Since the same character can appear in multiple fonts, different font of Chinese character has distinct keypoints. Thus, it brings difficulties in acquiring stroke order. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is introduced to generate lots of Chinese character images with different fonts for training and testing the proposed method. The keypoint ranking model based on stroke extraction combining font transfer based on GANs is proposed to complete this task. Compared to other methods, our method can be accomplished without human annotation as initial hints in prediction stage. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method that achieved 0.9667 NDCG in average and up to 29.53% samples are higher than 0.98 NDCG.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Advanced Institute of Manufacturing with High-tech Innovations, Center for Innovative Research on Aging Society (CIRAS), and Ministry of Science and Technology under grant No.109-2218-E-194-009-.

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Correspondence to Chen-Kuo Chiang.

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This article is part of the topical collection “Applications of Cloud Computing, Data Analytics and Building Secure Networks” guest edited by Rajnish Sharma, Pao-Ann Hsiung and Sagar Juneja.

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Li, HT., Jiang, MX., Huang, TT. et al. Font Generation and Keypoint Ranking for Stroke Order of Chinese Characters by Deep Neural Networks. SN COMPUT. SCI. 2, 324 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-021-00717-2

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