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Learning Features for Writer Identification from Handwriting on Papyri

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Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (MedPRAI 2020)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1322))

Abstract

Computerized analysis of historical documents has remained an interesting research area for the pattern classification community for many decades. From the perspective of computerized analysis, key challenges in the historical manuscripts include automatic transcription, dating, retrieval, classification of writing styles and identification of scribes etc. Among these, the focus of our current study lies on identification of writers from the digitized manuscripts. We exploit convolutional neural networks for extraction of features and characterization of writer. The ConvNets are first trained on contemporary handwriting samples and then fine-tuned to the limited set of historical manuscripts considered in our study. Dense sampling is carried out over a given manuscript producing a set of small writing patches for each document. Decisions on patches are combined using a majority vote to conclude the authorship of a query document. Preliminary experiments on a set of challenging and degraded manuscripts report promising performance.

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Acknowledgement

Authors would like to thank Dr. Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello from University of Basel, Switzerland for making the dataset available.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vision and Learning Lab, Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Sidra Nasir & Imran Siddiqi

Authors
  1. Sidra Nasir
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  2. Imran Siddiqi
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Sidra Nasir or Imran Siddiqi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Larbi Tebessi University, Tebessa, Algeria

    Chawki Djeddi

  2. Digital Research Center of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia

    Yousri Kessentini

  3. Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Imran Siddiqi

  4. Digital Research Centre of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia

    Mohamed Jmaiel

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Nasir, S., Siddiqi, I. (2021). Learning Features for Writer Identification from Handwriting on Papyri. In: Djeddi, C., Kessentini, Y., Siddiqi, I., Jmaiel, M. (eds) Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence. MedPRAI 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1322. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71804-6_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71804-6_17

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-71803-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-71804-6

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