Generating Chinese characters based on stroke splitting and feature extraction

•We present a decomposition database to generate new style Chinese characters.•Stroke segmentation rules are discussed.•A stroke feature searching algorithm is proposed.•The evaluation and experiments show a high fidelity of 96.4%.•Recombination database can be applied for other stroke constructed characters.

There is a large demand for more fashionable style Chinese characters in advertising, art designing and publishing markets. However, it becomes challenging to create a new font style for so many Chinese characters (over 10,000). To solve this problem, a comprehensive Chinese fonts generating scheme is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a decomposition database for stroke splitting and feature extraction is proposed. Secondly, stroke segmentation rules are defined based on splitting, merging and structural model, location definition and minimum feature extraction. Thirdly, a radical searching algorithm based on stroke splitting is presented. Finally, it is realized that the generated characters can be zoomed, rotated and moved. Experimental result shows that Chinese characters with a new style can be generated rapidly with the proposed scheme. The created characters fit the real ones well with a high fidelity of 96.4%. The usability tests are run and participants’ subjective report show that the performance from the generated characters is similar to the original characters in both recognizability test and style-consistency test. The fonts generating method is also reliable for the other stroke constructed block characters such as Japanese and Korean characters.