Fusion of correlated decisions for writer identification

Writer identification is carried out using the words of a short sentence. Each word is processed separately and used to decide about the presence of the specific writer. A likelihood ratio decision rule is employed for the word level decision. The individual decisions obtained from the words of the sentence are fused to improve the identification performance. The Bahadur-Lazarsfeld expansion is employed in order to deal with the correlation between individual decisions. The decision rule in the fusion process is a likelihood ratio test. An excellent identification performance is achieved with the proposed procedure.