STEFANN: Scene Text Editor using Font Adaptive Neural Network

Textual information in a captured scene plays an important role in scene interpretation and decision making. Though there exist methods that can successfully detect and interpret complex text regions present in a scene, to the best of our knowledge, there is no significant prior work that aims to modify the textual information in an image. The ability to edit text directly on images has several advantages including error correction, text restoration and image reusability. In this paper, we propose a method to modify text in an image at character-level. We approach the problem in two stages. At first, the unobserved character (target) is generated from an observed character (source) being modified. We propose two different neural network architectures - (a) FANnet to achieve structural consistency with source font and (b) Colornet to preserve source color. Next, we replace the source character with the generated character maintaining both geometric and visual consistency with neighboring characters. Our method works as a unified platform for modifying text in images. We present the effectiveness of our method on COCO-Text and ICDAR datasets both qualitatively and quantitatively.Comment: Accepted in The IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 202

Multi-Content GAN for Few-Shot Font Style Transfer

In this work, we focus on the challenge of taking partial observations of highly-stylized text and generalizing the observations to generate unobserved glyphs in the ornamented typeface. To generate a set of multi-content images following a consistent style from very few examples, we propose an end-to-end stacked conditional GAN model considering content along channels and style along network layers. Our proposed network transfers the style of given glyphs to the contents of unseen ones, capturing highly stylized fonts found in the real-world such as those on movie posters or infographics. We seek to transfer both the typographic stylization (ex. serifs and ears) as well as the textual stylization (ex. color gradients and effects.) We base our experiments on our collected data set including 10,000 fonts with different styles and demonstrate effective generalization from a very small number of observed glyphs

Chinese Font Style Transfer with Neural Network

Font design is an important area in digital art. However, designers have to design character one by one manually. At the same time, Chinese contains more than 20,000 characters. Chinese offical dataset GB 18030-2000 has 27,533 characters. ZhongHuaZiHai, an official Chinese dictionary, contains 85,568 characters. And JinXiWenZiJing, an dataset published by AINet company, includes about 160,000 chinese characters. Thus Chinese font design is a hard task. In the paper, we introduce a method to help designers finish the process faster. With the method, designers only need to design a small set of Chinese characters. Other characters will be generated automatically. Deep neural network develops fast these years and is very powerful. We tried many kinds of deep neural network with different structure and finally use the one we introduce here. The generated characters have similar style as the ones designed by designer as shown in experiment part

Recognition of Japanese handwritten characters with Machine learning techniques

The recognition of Japanese handwritten characters has always been a challenge for researchers. A large number of classes, their graphic complexity, and the existence of three different writing systems make this problem particularly difficult compared to Western writing. For decades, attempts have been made to address the problem using traditional OCR (Optical Character Recognition) techniques, with mixed results. With the recent popularization of machine learning techniques through neural networks, this research has been revitalized, bringing new approaches to the problem. These new results achieve performance levels comparable to human recognition. Furthermore, these new techniques have allowed collaboration with very different disciplines, such as the Humanities or East Asian studies, achieving advances in them that would not have been possible without this interdisciplinary work. In this thesis, these techniques are explored until reaching a sufficient level of understanding that allows us to carry out our own experiments, training neural network models with public datasets of Japanese characters. However, the scarcity of public datasets makes the task of researchers remarkably difficult. Our proposal to minimize this problem is the development of a web application that allows researchers to easily collect samples of Japanese characters through the collaboration of any user. Once the application is fully operational, the examples collected until that point will be used to create a new dataset in a specific format. Finally, we can use the new data to carry out comparative experiments with the previous neural network models

Advances in Character Recognition

This book presents advances in character recognition, and it consists of 12 chapters that cover wide range of topics on different aspects of character recognition. Hopefully, this book will serve as a reference source for academic research, for professionals working in the character recognition field and for all interested in the subject

A character-recognition system for Hangeul

This work presents a rule-based character-recognition system for the Korean script, Hangeul. An input raster image representing one Korean character (Hangeul syllable) is thinned down to a skeleton, and the individual lines extracted. The lines, along with information on how they are interconnected, are translated into a set of hierarchical graphs, which can be easily traversed and compared with a set of reference structures represented in the same way. Hangeul consists of consonant and vowel graphemes, which are combined into blocks representing syllables. Each reference structure describes one possible variant of such a grapheme. The reference structures that best match the structures found in the input are combined to form a full Hangeul syllable. Testing all of the 11 172 possible characters, each rendered as a 200-pixel-squared raster image using the gothic font AppleGothic Regular, had a recognition accuracy of 80.6 percent. No separation logic exists to be able to handle characters whose graphemes are overlapping or conjoined; with such characters removed from the set, thereby reducing the total number of characters to 9 352, an accuracy of 96.3 percent was reached. Hand-written characters were also recognised, to a certain degree. The work shows that it is possible to create a workable character-recognition system with reasonably simple means