Week 6 Midterm Project Proposal by Jonghyun Jee

Background

It’s interesting to think about the way how earliest Chinese characters were created, as they are visual representations of real objects rather than of symbols. 山 looks like a mountain, 木 a tree; we can clearly see the resemblance. Although modern Chinese characters have developed into a complex writing system that include both pronunciation and abstraction parts, early Chinese characters such as  Zhuànshū(篆书) and Jiǎgǔzì(甲骨字) are more inclined to be pictographic.

Project

I’d like to create a project that is based on these ancient Chinese characters: if a user uploads an image file as an input, trained algorithm will show the result of most resembling ancient Chinese character. Or it can trace contours of an image and create a new Zhuànshū character (I don’t think it requires artificial intelligence to perform such task though). If unsupervised learning is too hard, I may try supervised learning by labelling a few ancient Chinese characters.

Methodology

For the training data, I need to figure out where to get a data set that includes characters as many as possible. I’m thinking of extracting data from a Chinese font file, as it’s standardized and convertible in digital format; 64X64 or presumably 32X32 sizes will be sufficient to represent each character. It may require image classification but I still need a lot more research on how to substantialize this idea.

Examples

Below are the images that I found particularly resembling. It’d be interesting to see how algorithm might pair a given image with a similar traditional character.