SwordNet: Chinese Character Font Style Recognition Network

Chinese characters have been created into many font styles, such as official script, running script, and regular script. Other than that, some famous calligraphers, such as Ouyang Xun and Yan Zhenqing, have produced fonts with their style. Being able to detect and recognize these font styles quickly and accurately has essential applications in graphic design, page layout, handwriting identification, and other use cases. Distinguishing between font styles requires professional knowledge, which almost inevitably leads to errors for unprofessional people. Therefore, this paper presents a sword-like model based on a convolutional neural network with a sword structure to recognize font styles for Chinese characters. This model includes 15 convolutional layers. For each layer, we gradually increase the number of convolutional kernels to better extract the classification features of the input image. This paper uses four downsampling layers in the model. For each downsampling operation, the length and width of the image become half of their original values while the number of channels gradually increases, leading to a sword-like shape. As a result, we name our model as SwordNet. We also created a Chinese font dataset called the Nankai Chinese Font Style dataset and made it available on Github. Using the above dataset, we compared the accuracy of our model with six other state-of-the-art network models. The experiments showed that SwordNet could achieve an average recognition accuracy of 99.03% in multiple experiments, while the other six models can only achieve accuracy up to 94.91%. So we can conclude that SwordNet could perform better in font style recognition than other models.