Calligraphic Stylisation Learning with a Physiologically Plausible Model of Movement and Recurrent Neural Networks

Abstract: We propose a computational framework to learn stylisation patterns from example drawings or writings, and then generate new trajectories that possess similar stylistic qualities. We particularly focus on the generation and stylisation of trajectories that are similar to the ones that can be seen in calligraphy and graffiti art. Our system is able to extract and learn dynamic and visual qualities from a small number of user defined examples which can be recorded with a digitiser device, such as a tablet, mouse or motion capture sensors. Our system is then able to transform new user drawn traces to be kinematically and stylistically similar to the training examples. We implement the system using a Recurrent Mixture Density Network (RMDN) combined with a representation given by the parameters of the Sigma Lognormal model, a physiologically plausible model of movement that has been shown to closely reproduce the velocity and trace of human handwriting gestures.