Style-preserving English handwriting synthesis

Abstract

This paper presents a novel and effective approach to synthesize English handwriting in the user’s writing style. We select the most important features that depict the handwriting style, including character glyph, size, slant, and pressure, special connection style, letter spacing, and cursiveness. The features can be efficiently computed with the aid of our specially designed sample collecting user interface. Given ASCII text, the user handwriting is synthesized hierarchically. First, character glyphs are sampled and shape variation is added. Second, words are generated by aligning the character glyphs on the baseline with proper horizontal inter-character space and vertical offset from the baseline. The heads and tails of the letters may be trimmed to avoid severe overlap and facilitate possible connections between neighboring letters. Adjacent letters may be connected to each other by polynomial interpolation. Finally, after the pressure is assigned, the handwriting is rendered word by word and then line by line. The experimental results prove the capability of our system to adapt to the user’s writing style.