Writing style adversarial network for handwritten Chinese character recognition

The performance of handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR) has been greatly improved by using deep learning methods in recent years. But few people pay attention to the influence of writing style on it. In this paper, we aim to improve the performance of HCCR further by weakening the influence of different writing styles. We propose a writing style adversarial network (WSAN) which includes three parts: feature extractor, character classifier and writer classifier. In the training process, we first preprocess raw image with feature extractor. Afterwards, the learned features are fed into both the character classifier and the writer classifier. We apply joint optimization on the top of these two classifiers. Specifically, we minimize the loss value of the character classifier to achieve character recognition function. At the same time, we maximize the loss value of the writer classifier to reduce the influence of writing style in HCCR. The experimental results on CASIA-HWDB1.1 prove that the proposed WSAN has a promoting effect on HCCR. And the experiments on the offline HCCR competition dataset of ICDAR-2013 also give competitive results compared with other methods.