A new approach for ancient inscriptions' writer identification

A novel approach is introduced here for identifying the writer of an ancient inscription, via of methods of pattern recognition, image processing and mathematics. Identifying the writer of an ancient inscription is of fundamental importance for Archaeometry and History, since, it is, so far, the only objective method for dating its content. The introduced method consists in a) pairwise matching of all realizations of an alphabet symbol on two inscriptions. This matching is performed so as to compensate for systematic differences in size, orientation and position of the various letters of the documents, b) a new criterion that quantitatively describes the goodness of fit is given, c) the statistical distribution of quantities associated with this criterion, are estimated, d) novel statistical criteria for deciding if two inscriptions are made by the same writer or not, have been developed. The approach has been successfully applied to 32 Classical and Hellenistic inscriptions, flawlessly classifying them into 9 writers.