Authorship Identification of Ukiyoe by Using Rakkan Image

This paper describes a method of identifying authorship of Ukiyoe prints by using Rakkan images found in the prints. A weighted direction index histogram method has been used to create the feature vector for Rakkan character analysis. Also the Pseudo Mahalanobis distances were used to judge distances between dictionary templates and test data. The method includes binarization of Rakkan images which has been done by recursively applying the Otsu method, which realized good character segmentation performance, eliminating the influence of stain and smears. We used 100 Ukiyoe prints which were drawn by 10 artists as both templates and test samples. The identification experiment was done using the leave-one-out method. The results of the experiment indicate there is a possibility of successfully using this method for identifying authorship of Ukiyoe.