Generating synthetic handwriting using n-gram letter glyphs

Abstract

We propose a framework for synthesis of natural semi cursive handwritten Latin script that can find application in text personalization, or in generation of synthetic data for recognition systems. Our method is based on the generation of synthetic n-gram letter glyphs and their subsequent concatenation. We propose a non-parametric data driven generation scheme that is able to mimic the variation observed in handwritten glyph samples to synthesize natural looking synthetic glyphs. These synthetic glyphs are then stitched together to form complete words, using a spline based concatenation scheme. Further, as a refinement, our method is able to generate pen-lifts, giving our results a natural semi-cursive look. Through subjective experiments and detailed analysis of the results, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our formulation in being able to generate natural looking synthetic script.