Writer identification approach based on bag of words with OBI features

Handwriter identification aims to simplify the task of forensic experts by providing them with semi-automated tools in order to enable them to narrow down the search to determine the final identification of an unknown handwritten sample. An identification algorithm aims to produce a list of predicted writers of the unknown handwritten sample ranked in terms of confidence measure metrics for use by the forensic expert will make the final decision.

Most existing handwriter identification systems use either statistical or model-based approaches. To further improve the performances this paper proposes to deploy a combination of both approaches using Oriented Basic Image features and the concept of graphemes codebook. To reduce the resulting high dimensionality of the feature vector a Kernel Principal Component Analysis has been used. To gauge the effectiveness of the proposed method a performance analysis, using IAM dataset for English handwriting and ICFHR 2012 dataset for Arabic handwriting, has been carried out. The results obtained achieved an accuracy of 96% thus demonstrating its superiority when compared against similar techniques.