Character-independent font identification

Abstract

There are a countless number of fonts with various shapes and styles. In addition, there are many fonts that only have subtle differences in features. Due to this, font identification is a difficult task. In this paper, we propose a method of determining if any two characters are from the same font or not. This is difficult due to the difference between fonts typically being smaller than the difference between alphabet classes. Additionally, the proposed method can be used with fonts regardless of whether they exist in the training or not. In order to accomplish this, we use a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained with various font image pairs. In the experiment, the network is trained on image pairs of various fonts. We then evaluate the model on a different set of fonts that are unseen by the network. The evaluation is performed with an accuracy of 92.27%. Moreover, we analyzed the relationship between character classes and font identification accuracy.