A Novel Three-Staged Generative Model for Skeletonizing Chinese Characters with Versatile Styles

Skeletons of characters provide vital information to support a variety of tasks, e.g., optical character recognition, image restoration, stroke segmentation and extraction, and style learning and transfer. However, automatically skeletonizing Chinese characters poses a steep computational challenge due to the large volume of Chinese characters and their versatile styles, for which traditional image analysis approaches are error-prone and fragile. Current deep learning based approach requires a heavy amount of manual labeling efforts, which imposes serious limitations on the precision, robustness, scalability and generalizability of an algorithm to solve a specific problem. To tackle the above challenge, this paper introduces a novel three-staged deep generative model developed as an image-to-image translation approach, which significantly reduces the model's demand for labeled training samples. The new model is built upon an improved G-net, an enhanced X-net, and a newly proposed F-net. As compellingly demonstrated by comprehensive experimental results, the new model is able to iteratively extract skeletons of Chinese characters in versatile styles with a high quality, which noticeably outperforms two state-of-the-art peer deep learning methods and a classical thinning algorithm in terms of F-measure, Hausdorff distance, and average Hausdorff distance.