Positional Component-Guided Hangul Font Image Generation via Deep Semantic Segmentation and Adversarial Style Transfer

Automated font generation for complex, compositional scripts like Korean Hangul presents a significant challenge due to the 11,172 characters and their complicated component-based structure. While existing component-based methods for font image generation acknowledge the compositional nature of Hangul, they often fail to explicitly leverage the crucial positional semantics of its basic elements as initial, middle, and final components, known as Jamo. This oversight can lead to structural inconsistencies and artifacts in the generated glyphs. This paper introduces a novel two-stage framework that directly addresses this gap by imposing a strong, linguistically informed structural principle on the font image generation process. In the first stage, we employ a You Only Look Once version 8 for Segmentation (YOLOv8-Seg) model, a state-of-the-art instance segmentation network, to decompose Hangul characters into their basic components. Notably, this process generates a dataset of position-aware semantic components, categorizing each jamo according to its structural role within the syllabic block. In the second stage, a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) is explicitly conditioned on these extracted positional components to perform style transfer with high structural information. The generator learns to synthesize a character’s appearance by referencing the style of the target components while preserving the content structure of a source character. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing L1 loss to 0.2991 and improving the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) to 0.9798, quantitatively outperforming existing methods like MX-Font and CKFont. This position-guided approach demonstrates significant quantitative and qualitative improvements over existing methods in structured script generation, offering enhanced control over glyph structure and a promising approach for generating font images for other complex, structured scripts.