Abstract There are two types of information in each handwritten word image: explicit information which can be easily read or derived directly, such as lexical content or word length, and implicit attributes such as the author’s identity. Whether features learned by a neural network for one task can be used for another task remains an open question. In this paper, we present a deep adaptive learning method for writer identification based on single-word images using multi-task learning. An auxiliary task is added to the training process to enforce the emergence of reusable features. Our proposed method transfers the benefits of the learned features of a convolutional neural network from an auxiliary task such as explicit content recognition to the main task of writer identification in a single procedure. Specifically, we propose a new adaptive convolutional layer to exploit the learned deep features. A multi-task neural network with one or several adaptive convolutional layers is trained end-to-end, to exploit robust generic features for a specific main task, i.e., writer identification. Three auxiliary tasks, corresponding to three explicit attributes of handwritten word images (lexical content, word length and character attributes), are evaluated. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed deep adaptive learning method can improve the performance of writer identification based on single-word images, compared to non-adaptive and simple linear-adaptive approaches.
In this paper, a new model-based writer identification scheme using histogram symbolic representation approach is proposed. In the proposed scheme, initially, some pre-processing techniques are employed to enhance image quality and extract text-lines from each handwritten document image. For each extracted text-line, a set of 92 features are computed based on analysis of connected component, enclosed region, lower and upper contours, fractal code, and Curve let. Considering the extracted feature vectors, a histogram is created for each feature of every writer as a histogram-valued symbolic data. This process results in a handwriting style model for each individual that consists of a set of histograms. To evaluate the proposed scheme, two different handwritten datasets written in two different scripts (Kannada as an Indian based script and English) were used. The first dataset contains 228 pages written in Kannada by 57 people. The other one is the dataset used in SigWiComp2013 composed of 330 document pages written in English by 55 individuals. The same criteria used in the SigWiComp2013 were followed in our evaluation strategy. Concerning the Kannada dataset, an F-measure of 92.79 was obtained when 114 documents were used in learning stage and the rest (114) were used for testing. For the SigWiComp2013 dataset an F-measure of 26.67 was obtained that is fairly comparable to the best result reported in the literature. We describe how oriented Basic Image Feature Columns (oBIF Columns) can be used for writer identification and how this texture-based scheme can be enhanced by encoding a writer's style as the deviation from the mean encoding for a population of writers. We hypothesise that this deviation, the Delta encoding, provides a more informative encoding than the texture-based encoding alone. The methods have been evaluated using the IAM dataset and by making entries to two top international competitions for assessing the state-of-the-art in writer identification. We demonstrate that the oBIF Column scheme on its own is sufficient to gain a performance level of 99 when tested using 300 writers from the IAM dataset. However, on the more challenging competition datasets, significantly improved performance was obtained using the Delta encoding scheme, which achieved first place in both competitions. In our characterisation of the Delta encoding, we demonstrate that the method is making use of information contained in the correlation between the written style of different textual elements, which may not be used by other methods. HighlightsWe present a full description of the oBIF Column method as applied to writer identification.We evaluate the oBIF Column encoding scheme using the IAM dataset, producing a performance of 99 for 301 writers.We present the Delta encoding, an addition to the oBIF Column scheme.We evaluate the Delta encoding using two leading international competitions, gaining first place in both.We show how our method uses different sources of information. Writer identification is an essential component in computational forensic. In this paper, we attempt to do this job based only on isolated characters and numerals. For that, at first, some points of interest (keypoints) on the image are detected by structural analysis and SIFT based detector. Then we calculate a set of features within a certain neighborhood of the keypoint and employ fusion rule on multiple probabilistic SVM classifiers output for writer identification. For experimental analysis, a database containing 212,300 isolated Bangla orthosyllabic characters and numerals are generated with the help of 100 writers. We obtain fairly good result to identify a writer. We also try to find a small set of highly discriminative characters storing extra information about the writing style of an individual.