Information Retrieval Based Writer Identification

This communication deals with the Writer Identification task. Our previous work has shown the interest of using the graphemes as features for describing the individual properties of Handwriting. We propose here to exploit the same feature set but using an information retrieval paradigm to describe and compare the handwritten query to each sample of handwriting in the database. Using this technique the image processing stage is performed only once and before the retrieval process can take place, thus leading to a significant saving in the computation of each query response, compared to our initial proposition. The method has been tested on two handwritten databases. The first one has been collected from 88 different writers at PSI Lab. while the second one contains 39 writers from the original correspondence of Emile Zola, a famous French novelist of the last 19th century. We also analyze the proposed method when using concatenation of graphemes (bi and tri-gramme) as features.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ICDAR
• Authors: Ameur Bensefia, Thierry Paquet, Laurent Heutte
• Keywords: Document Analysis, Graphemes, ICDAR 2003, Information Retrieval Paradigm, Writer Identification Task