Automatic character generation is an appealing solution for typeface design, especially for Chinese fonts with over 3700 most commonly-used characters. This task is particularly challenging for handwritten characters with thin strokes which are error-prone during deformation. To handle the generation of thin strokes, we introduce an auxiliary branch for stroke refinement. The auxiliary branch is trained to generate the bold version of target characters which are then fed to the dominating branch to guide the stroke refinement. The two branches are jointly trained in a collaborative fashion. In addition, for practical use, it is desirable to train the character synthesis model with a small set of manually designed characters. Taking advantage of content-reuse phenomenon in Chinese characters, we further propose an online zoom-augmentation strategy to reduce the dependency on large size training sets. The proposed model is trained end-to-end and can be added on top of any method for font synthesis. Experimental results on handwritten font synthesis have shown that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under practical setting, i.e. with only 750 paired training samples.
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