# DG-Font: Deformable Generative Networks for Unsupervised Font Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03064 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03064/

## Key facts

- Cited by 70 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04406/) (2018)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [Everybody Dance Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07371/) (2018)
- [DualGAN: Unsupervised Dual Learning for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02510/) (2017)
- [Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07828/) (2016)
- [Learning to Discover Cross-Domain Relations with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05192/) (2017)
- [Integral Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08229/) (2017)
- [TDAN: Temporally Deformable Alignment Network for Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02898/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01723/) (2019)
- [Coupled Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07536/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02200/) (2016)
- [The One Hundred Layers Tiramisu: Fully Convolutional DenseNets for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09326/) (2016)
- [Multi-Content GAN for Few-Shot Font Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00516/) (2017)
- [One-Sided Unsupervised Domain Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00826/) (2017)
- [ScrabbleGAN: Semi-Supervised Varying Length Handwritten Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10557/) (2020)
- [Separating Style and Content for Generalized Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06454/) (2017)
- [Multi-style Generative Network for Real-time Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06953/) (2017)
- [Object Detection in Video with Spatiotemporal Sampling Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05549/) (2018)
- [Rethinking the Truly Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06500/) (2020)
- [Few-shot Font Generation with Localized Style Representations and Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11042/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [FontDiffuser: One-Shot Font Generation via Denoising Diffusion with Multi-Scale Content Aggregation and Style Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12142/) (2023)
- [Brush Your Text: Synthesize Any Scene Text on Images via Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12232/) (2023)
- [Diff-Font: Diffusion Model for Robust One-Shot Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05895/) (2022)
- [Disentangling Writer and Character Styles for Handwriting Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14736/) (2023)
- [Few-Shot Font Generation by Learning Fine-Grained Local Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09965/) (2022)
- [GlyphDraw: Seamlessly Rendering Text with Intricate Spatial Structures in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17870/) (2023)
- [Look Closer to Supervise Better: One-Shot Font Generation via Component-Based Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00146/) (2022)
- [Handwritten Text Generation from Visual Archetypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15269/) (2023)
- [DeepVecFont-v2: Exploiting Transformers to Synthesize Vector Fonts with Higher Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14585/) (2023)
- [CF-Font: Content Fusion for Few-shot Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14017/) (2023)
- [One-Shot Diffusion Mimicker for Handwritten Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04004/) (2024)
- [XMP-Font: Self-Supervised Cross-Modality Pre-training for Few-Shot Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05084/) (2022)
- [TextPainter: Multimodal Text Image Generation with Visual-harmony and Text-comprehension for Poster Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04733/) (2023)
- [VATr++: Choose Your Words Wisely for Handwritten Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10798/) (2024)
- [AGTGAN: Unpaired Image Translation for Photographic Ancient Character Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07012/) (2023)
- [SGBANet: Semantic GAN and Balanced Attention Network for Arbitrarily Oriented Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10256/) (2022)
- [Zero-shot Generation of Training Data with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15660/) (2023)
- [Intelligent Artistic Typography: A Comprehensive Review of Artistic Text Design and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14774/) (2024)
- [Few shot font generation via transferring similarity guided global style and quantization local style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00827/) (2023)
- [Few-shot Font Generation with Weakly Supervised Localized Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11895/) (2021)
- [Decoupling Layout from Glyph in Online Chinese Handwriting Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02309/) (2024)
- [Font Generation with Missing Impression Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10348/) (2022)
- [SE-GAN: Skeleton Enhanced GAN-based Model for Brush Handwriting Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10484/) (2022)
- [GenText: Unsupervised Artistic Text Generation via Decoupled Font and Texture Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09649/) (2022)
- [FontTransformer: Few-shot High-resolution Chinese Glyph Image Synthesis via Stacked Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06301/) (2022)
- [VQ-Font: Few-Shot Font Generation with Structure-Aware Enhancement and Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14018/) (2023)
- [Typographic Text Generation with Off-the-Shelf Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14314/) (2024)
- [HFH-Font: Few-shot Chinese Font Synthesis with Higher Quality, Faster Speed, and Higher Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06488/) (2024)
- [Few-shot Font Generation by Learning Style Difference and Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10008/) (2023)
- [Ambigram Generation by A Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12049/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Font generation is a challenging problem especially for some writing systems that consist of a large number of characters and has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. However, existing methods for font generation are often in supervised learning. They require a large number of paired data, which is labor-intensive and expensive to collect. Besides, common image-to-image translation models often define style as the set of textures and colors, which cannot be directly applied to font generation. To address these problems, we propose novel deformable generative networks for unsupervised font generation (DGFont). We introduce a feature deformation skip connection (FDSC) which predicts pairs of displacement maps and employs the predicted maps to apply deformable convolution to the low-level feature maps from the content encoder. The outputs of FDSC are fed into a mixer to generate the final results. Taking advantage of FDSC, the mixer outputs a high-quality character with a complete structure. To further improve the quality of generated images, we use three deformable convolution layers in the content encoder to learn style-invariant feature representations. Experiments demonstrate that our model generates characters in higher quality than state-of-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/ecnuycxie/DG-Font.