Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

On writer identification for Arabic historical manuscripts

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper introduces new methodologies for reliably identifying writers of Arabic historical manuscripts. We propose an approach that transforms key point-based features, such as SIFT, into a global form that captures high-level characteristics of writing styles. We suggest a modification for a common local feature, the contour direction feature, and show the contribution of combining local and global features for writer identification. Our work also presents a novel algorithm that determines the number of writers involved in writing a given manuscript. The experimental study confirms the significant improvement in this algorithm on writer identification once applied to historical manuscripts. Comprehensive experiments using different features and classification schemes demonstrate the vitality of the suggested methodologies for reliable writer identification. The presented techniques were evaluated on both historical and modern documents where the suggested features yielded very promising results with respect to state-of-the-art features.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13
Fig. 14
Fig. 15

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Abdelhaleem, A., Droby, A., Asi, A., Kassis, M., Al Asam, R., El-sanaa, J.: Wahd: a database for writer identification of arabic historical documents. In: International Workshop on Arabic Script Analysis and Recognition, pp. 140–145 (2017)

  2. Adams, N., Smith, D.: The selected ion flow tube (sift); a technique for studying ion-neutral reactions. Int. J. Mass Spectrom. Ion Phys. 21(3–4), 349–359 (1976)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Altman, R.: The illusion of one writer in historical documents and its effect on automating writer identification. In: Proceedings of the Conference of the International Graphonomics Society, Dijon, France, pp. 1–4 (2009)

  4. Antonacopoulos, A., Downton, A.C.: Special issue on the analysis of historical documents. Int. J. Document Anal. Recognit. (IJDAR) 9, 75–77 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Asi, A., Cohen, R., Dinstein, I., Kedem, K., El-Sana, J.: A coarse-to-fine approach for layout analysis of ancient manuscripts. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, Crete Island, Greece, pp. 140–145 (2014)

  6. Awaida, S.M., Mahmoud, S.A.: State of the art in off-line writer identification of handwritten text and survey of writer identification of Arabic text. Educ. Res. Rev. 70(20), 445–463 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Bay, H., Tuytelaars, T., Van Gool, L.: Surf: speeded up robust features. Comput. Vis. ECCV 2006, 404–417 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Bensefia, A., Paquet, T., Heutte, L.: A writer identification and verification system. Pattern Recognit. Lett. 26(13), 2080–2092 (2005)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  9. Bertolini, D., Oliveira, L.S., Justino, E., Sabourin, R.: Texture-based descriptors for writer identification and verification. Expert Syst. Appl. 40(6), 2069–2080 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Brink, A., Bulacu, M., Schomaker, L.: How much handwritten text is needed for text-independent writer verification and identification. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Florida, USA, pp. 1–4 (2008)

  11. Brink, A., Smit, J., Bulacu, M., Schomaker, L.: Writer identification using directional ink-trace width measurements. Pattern Recognit. 45(1), 162–171 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Bulacu, M., Schomaker, L.: A comparison of clustering methods for writer identification and verification. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, Seoul, South Korea, pp. 1275–1279 (2005)

  13. Bulacu, M., Schomaker, L.: Text-independent writer identification and verification using textural and allographic features. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 29(4), 701–717 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Caliński, T., Harabasz, J.: A dendrite method for cluster analysis. Commun. Stat. 3(1), 1–27 (1974)

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  15. Christlein, V., Bernecker, D., Hönig, F., Maier, A., Angelopoulou, E.: Writer identification using GMM supervectors and exemplar-SVMS. Pattern Recognit. 63, 258–267 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Cohen, R., Asi, A., Kedem, K., El-Sana, J., Dinstein, I.: Robust text and drawing segmentation algorithm for historical documents. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing, Washington, DC, USA, pp. 110–117 (2013)

  17. Dasgupta, S., Gupta, A.: An elementary proof of a theorem of Johnson and Lindenstrauss. Random Struct. Algorithms 22(1), 60–65 (2003)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  18. Fecker, D., Asi, A., Margner, V., El-Sana, J., Fingscheidt, T.: Writer identification for historical documents. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Stockholm, Sweden, pp. 3050–3055 (2014)

  19. Fecker, D., Asi, A., Pantke, W., Margner, V., El-Sana, J., Fingscheidt, T.: Document writer analysis with rejection for historical Arabic documents. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, Crete Island, Greece, pp. 743–748 (2014)

  20. Fiel, S., Sablatnig, R.: Writer retrieval and writer identification using local features. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems, Queensland, Australia, pp. 145–149 (2012)

  21. Fiel, S., Sablatnig, R.: Writer identification and writer retrieval using the fisher vector on visual vocabularies. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, Washington DC, USA, pp. 545–549 (2013)

  22. Fogel, I., Sagi, D.: Gabor filters as texture discriminator. Biol. Cybern. 61(2), 103–113 (1989)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Gordo, A., Forns, A., Valveny, E.: Writer identification in handwritten musical scores with bags of notes. Pattern Recognit. 46(5), 1337–1345 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Hassane, A., Al-Madeed, S.: ICFHR 2012 competition on writer identification challenge 2: Arabic scripts. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, Bari, Italy, pp. 835–840 (2012)

  25. Holland, S.M.: Principal Components Analysis (PCA). University of Georgia, Georgia (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Jain, R., Doermann, D.: Combining local features for offline writer identification. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, Crete Island, Greece, pp. 583–588 (2014)

  27. Khalifa, E., Al-Maadeed, S., Tahir, M.A., Bouridane, A., Jamshed, A.: Off-line writer identification using an ensemble of grapheme codebook features. Pattern Recognit. Lett. 59, 18–25 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Li, Y., Wang, S., Tian, Q., Ding, X.: A survey of recent advances in visual feature detection. Neurocomputing 149, 736–751 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Liang, Y., Liu, L., Xu, Y., Xiang, Y., Zou, B.: Multi-task gloh feature selection for human age estimation. In: 2011 18th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), pp. 565–568. IEEE (2011)

  30. Lowe, D.G.: Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 60(2), 91–110 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Maaten, L., Postma, E.: Improving automatic writer identification. In: Proceedings of the Belgium–Netherlands Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Brussels, Belgium, pp. 260–266 (2005)

  32. Mahmoud, S.A., Ahmad, I., Al-Khatib, W.G., Alshayeb, M., Parvez, M.T., Märgner, V., Fink, G.A.: Khatt: an open arabic offline handwritten text database. Pattern Recognit. 47(3), 1096–1112 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Mahmoud, S.A., Ahmad, I., Al-Khatib, W.G., Alshayeb, M., Parvez, M.T., Margner, V., Fink, G.A.: Khatt: an open Arabic offline handwritten text database. Pattern Recognit. 47(3), 1096–1112 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Mikolajczyk, K., Schmid, C.: A performance evaluation of local descriptors. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. (PAMI) 27(10), 1615–1630 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Newell, A.J., Griffin, L.D.: Natural image character recognition using oriented basic image features. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Image Computing Techniques and Applications, Queensland, Australia, pp. 191–196 (2011)

  36. Plamondon, R., Lorette, G.: Automatic signature verification and writer identification the state of the art. Pattern Recognit. 22(2), 107–131 (1989)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Said, H.E.S., Baker, K., Tan, T.: Personal identification based on handwriting. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Queensland, Australia, pp. 1761–1764 (1998)

  38. Schlapbach, A., Bunke, H.: Off-linewriter identification using Gaussian mixture models. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Hong Kong, China, pp. 992–995 (2006)

  39. Schlapbach, A., Bunke, H.: A writer identification and verification system using HMM based recognizers. Pattern Anal. Appl. 10(1), 33–43 (2007)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  40. Siddiqi, I., Vincent, N.: Text independent writer recognition using redundant writing patterns with contour-based orientation and curvature features. Pattern Recognit. 43(11), 3853–3865 (2010)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  41. Spasova, V.G.: Experimental evaluation of keypoints detector and descriptor algorithms for indoors person localization. Annu. J. Electron. 8, 85–87 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  42. Sreeraj, M., Idicula, S.M.: A survey on writer identification schemes. Int. J. Comput. Appl. 26(2), 23–33 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  43. Srihari, S., Tomai, C., Zhang, B., Lee, S.: Individuality of numerals. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, Edinburgh, Scotland, pp. 1096–1100 (2003)

  44. Srihari, S.N., Cha, S.H., Arora, H., Lee, S.: Individuality of handwriting: a validation study. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, Seatle, USA, pp. 106–109 (2001)

  45. vml: WAHD dataset. https://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~vml/wahad.html (2016). Accessed 2016

  46. Zhang, B., Srihari, S.N.: Analysis of handwriting individuality using word features. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, Edinburgh, Scotland, pp. 1142–1146 (2003)

  47. Zhang, B., Srihari, S.N., Lee, S.: Individuality of handwritten characters. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, Edinburgh, Scotland, pp. 1086–1090 (2003)

  48. Zois, E., Anastassopoulos, V.: Morphological waveform coding for writer identification. Pattern Recognit. 33(3), 385–398 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by the Frankel Center for Computer Science, the Council of Higher Education of Israel. Special thanks to our colleague Ahmad Droby for his suggestion.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel

    Abedelkadir Asi, Alaa Abdalhaleem & Jihad El-Sana

  2. Institute for Communications Technology, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Brunswick, Germany

    Daniel Fecker & Volker Märgner

Authors
  1. Abedelkadir Asi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Alaa Abdalhaleem
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Daniel Fecker
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Volker Märgner
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Jihad El-Sana
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alaa Abdalhaleem.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Asi, A., Abdalhaleem, A., Fecker, D. et al. On writer identification for Arabic historical manuscripts. IJDAR 20, 173–187 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-017-0289-3

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-017-0289-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation