ICFHR 2018 Competition on Multi-Script Writer Identification

This paper describes the ICFHR 2018 Competition on Multi-script Writer Identification with details on the competition tasks, databases employed, submitted systems, evaluation protocol and the reported results. The competition was aimed at exploring the traditional writer identification problem in a more challenging scenario of a multi-script environment where training and test samples of writers come from different scripts. Three different databases with handwriting samples in Arabic, French, English, Chinese and Farsi were employed in the six competition tasks. The realized results indicate that while high identification rates are reported in the literature by traditional writer identification systems, identifying writers in a multiscript environment is a much more challenging problem that requires significant investigations to extract effective handwriting representations that are able to characterize the writer across different scripts.