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LUC DEVROYE

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AIZI: database of Chinese characters

The AIZI research project is spearheaded by the MA programme in Type Design at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne with the support of the HES-SO, University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland and the collaboration of the Computer Vision Laboratory (CVLab) at EPFL, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. AIZI is an abbreviation of Artificial Intelligence Chinese Character. Shuhui Shi (ECAL), initiator of the project, was in charge of the design part in collaboration with Kai Bernau, under the supervision of Matthieu Cortat (Head of Master Type Design, ECAL). The Machine Learning process and algorithms were developed by Wei Wang (EPFL), under the supervision of Mathieu Salzmann from the EPFL Computer Vision Laboratory.

The AIZI research project offers a unique database of over 93,000 Chinese characters in order to help type designers draw Chinese typefaces. The developers write: Despite being used by some 900 million native speakers, the Chinese writing system currently relies on a small number of digital typefaces, in print or on screen. This is partly due to the quantity of characters. There is no official figure, but some dictionaries reach up to 106,230 glyphs, with the Unicode standard featuring only 20,902 glyphs. A Chinese scholar knows over 13,000 and being able to read a mere quarter of this figure is nothing to be ashamed of in contemporary China. For a designer, creating a Chinese typeface can easily take more than a year and represents a far greater investment, both in time and money, than a Latin (or Greek, or Cyrillic) one. These practical difficulties also limit foreigners' interest in Chinese type design, as the task seems insurmountable. Could Artificial Intelligence (AI) help Chinese type design overcome its current limitations? Is it possible to teach a Machine Learning programme about the rules of Chinese composition and design in order to enable it to create the thousands of glyphs required for a typeface? The initial idea behind the AIZI research project was to define a reduced set of basic seed characters that could be used as training data for an AI system, with the ultimate goals of democratising the design of Chinese typefaces and access to script for beginners and foreigners and to expand the stylistic range for a writing system that is largely dominated by traditional brush-based calligraphic shapes. Eventually, this could lead to greater quality in the production of fonts for Chinese script, explains Shuhui Shi, who launched the project as part of her ECAL Master Type Design programme.

EXTERNAL LINKS
AIZI: database of Chinese characters
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INTERNAL LINKS
Type design in China ⦿ Type design in Switzerland ⦿