Chinese font recognition (CFR) has gained significant attention in recent years. However, due to the sparsity of labeled font samples and the structural complexity of Chinese characters, CFR is still a challenging task. In this paper, a DropRegion method is proposed to generate a large number of stochastic variant font samples whose local regions are selectively disrupted and an inception font network (IFN) with two additional convolutional neural network (CNN) structure elements, i.e., a cascaded cross-channel parametric pooling (CCCP) and global average pooling, is designed. Because the distribution of strokes in a font image is non-stationary, an elastic meshing technique that adaptively constructs a set of local regions with equalized information is developed. Thus, DropRegion is seamlessly embedded in the IFN, which enables end-to-end training; the proposed DropRegion-IFN can be used for high performance CFR. Experimental results have confirmed the effectiveness of our new approach for CFR.
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