Component Extraction from Handwritten Chinese Characters for Font Synthesis in Personal Style Using Smartphone APP

To create a Chinese font, even for professional font designers, it still has to take a lot of time and efforts. A Chinese font typically packs glyphs of several thousand or more Chinese characters, and many of them are very complicated. Previously we had presented an easy and fast solution for an ordinary user to create a Chinese font of his or her handwriting style. We adopt the approach: synthesizing Chinese characters using components extracted from users' handwritings. According to our analysis, a user has to handwrite 400 or so Chinese characters to create a personal handwriting font, with commonly-used 3,914 traditional Chinese characters. In this paper, we present a convenient APP for smartphone users, on which they can write one character by one character. The APP can track every stroke, recognize and extract components from the user's handwritings. Thus, target Chinese characters can be synthesized from these extracted components, by placing them properly according to their position and size information. The experiment results show that with the APP, our system can easily extract required components from users' handwritings. As a result, users can easily create a Chinese font of their personal handwriting style.