# Layout Stroke Imitation: A Layout Guided Handwriting Stroke Generation for Style Imitation with Diffusion Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15678 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15678/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 27 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [GANwriting: Content-Conditioned Generation of Styled Handwritten Word Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02567/) (2020)
- [DeepWriting: Making Digital Ink Editable via Deep Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08379/) (2018)
- [Adaptively-Realistic Image Generation from Stroke and Sketch with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12675/) (2022)
- [Text and Style Conditioned GAN for Generation of Offline Handwriting Lines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00678/) (2020)
- [Content and Style Aware Generation of Text-line Images for Handwriting Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05539/) (2022)
- [Disentangling Writer and Character Styles for Handwriting Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14736/) (2023)
- [Handwritten Text Generation from Visual Archetypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15269/) (2023)
- [Diffusion models for Handwriting Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06704/) (2020)
- [Generating Handwriting via Decoupled Style Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11354/) (2020)
- [WordStylist: Styled Verbatim Handwritten Text Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16576/) (2023)
- [Handwriting Biometrics: Applications and Future Trends in e-Security and e-Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12760/) (2022)
- [VATr++: Choose Your Words Wisely for Handwritten Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10798/) (2024)
- [DiffusionPen: Towards Controlling the Style of Handwritten Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06065/) (2024)
- [Refining Text-to-Image Generation: Towards Accurate Training-Free Glyph-Enhanced Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16422/) (2024)
- [Handwriting Trajectory Recovery using End-to-End Deep Encoder-Decoder Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07211/) (2018)
- [TRACE: A Differentiable Approach to Line-level Stroke Recovery for Offline Handwritten Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11559/) (2021)
- [Writing Order Recovery in Complex and Long Static Handwriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03194/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Handwriting stroke generation is crucial for improving the performance of tasks such as handwriting recognition and writers order recovery. In handwriting stroke generation, it is significantly important to imitate the sample calligraphic style. The previous studies have suggested utilizing the calligraphic features of the handwriting. However, they had not considered word spacing (word layout) as an explicit handwriting feature, which results in inconsistent word spacing for style imitation. Firstly, this work proposes multi-scale attention features for calligraphic style imitation. These multi-scale feature embeddings highlight the local and global style features. Secondly, we propose to include the words layout, which facilitates word spacing for handwriting stroke generation. Moreover, we propose a conditional diffusion model to predict strokes in contrast to previous work, which directly generated style images. Stroke generation provides additional temporal coordinate information, which is lacking in image generation. Hence, our proposed conditional diffusion model for stroke generation is guided by calligraphic style and word layout for better handwriting imitation and stroke generation in a calligraphic style. Our experimentation shows that the proposed diffusion model outperforms the current state-of-the-art stroke generation and is competitive with recent image generation networks.