Writer Identification on Historical Documents using Oriented Basic Image Features

This study addresses the problem of identifying the authorship of historical manuscripts, a challenging task that offers interesting applications for document examiners and paleographers. We exploit handwriting texture as the discriminative attribute characterizing the writer of a given document. The textural information in handwriting is captured using a combination of oriented Basic Image Features (oBIFs) at different scales. Classification is carried out using a number of distance metrics which are combined to arrive at a final decision. A comprehensive series of experiments is carried out using different configurations of the oBIFs and the realized classification rates are compared with the state-of-the-art techniques on this problem