Chinese flower-bird character generation based on pencil drawings or brush drawings
Guanzhao Li, Jianwei Zhang, Danni Chen, Zhen-Mei Liu, Junting He · Journal of Electronic Imaging · 2019
Chinese flower-bird characters are gems of traditional Chinese art. It is an artistic font and the strokes of the characters are designed as beautiful patterns of flowers, birds, etc. The generation of such characters requires painters’ great efforts. Imagine that if we only need to sketch the outline of the ideal flower-bird characters using a pencil, and then we can quickly obtain these artistic characters, which will be of great significance in promoting their development, allowing more people to appreciate and even create this art by computer. Recently, with the development of deep learning and the invention of generative adversarial networks (GANs), some studies on font generation have made new progress. However, there is no research on the generation of flower-bird characters. We provide a solution by designing a GAN-based architecture to generate flower-bird characters. More specifically, a generator inspired by U-Net translates pencil drawings or brush drawings to flower-bird characters, and a patch-level discriminator distinguishes whether the received image is real. In addition to adversarial loss, a valid loss term called structural similarity loss is designed to further drive the network to generate satisfactory images. The quantitative analysis and user perceptual validation show the effectiveness of our method.