Description
Exploring the Latent Space of Chinese Handwriting. These images were created by a deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN) trained on a database of handwritten Chinese characters, made with code by Alec Radford based on the paper by Radford, Luke Metz, and Soumith Chintala in November 2015.
The title is a reference to the 1988 book by Xu Bing, who composed thousands of fictitious glyphs in the style of traditional Mandarin prints of the Song and Ming dynasties.
A DCGAN is a type of convolutional neural network which is capable of learning an abstract representation of a collection of images. It achieves this via competition between a "generator" which fabricates fake images and a "discriminator" which tries to discern if the generator's images are authentic (more details). After training, the generator can be used to convincingly generate samples reminiscent of the originals.
