Automatic writer identification framework for online handwritten documents using character prototypes

This paper proposes an automatic text-independent writer identification framework that integrates an industrial handwriting recognition system, which is used to perform an automatic segmentation of an online handwritten document at the character level. Subsequently, a fuzzy c-means approach is adopted to estimate statistical distributions of character prototypes on an alphabet basis. These distributions model the unique handwriting styles of the writers. The proposed system attained an accuracy of 99.2% when retrieved from a database of 120 writers. The only limitation is that a minimum length of text needs to be present in the document in order for sufficient accuracy to be achieved. We have found that this minimum length of text is about 160 characters or approximately equivalent to 3 lines of text. In addition, the discriminative power of different alphabets on the accuracy is also reported.     

A combination of features for symbol-independent writer identification in old music scores

The aim of writer identification is determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper, we present an architecture for writer identification in old handwritten music scores. Even though an important amount of music compositions contain handwritten text, the aim of our work is to use only music notation to determine the author. The main contribution is therefore the use of features extracted from graphical alphabets. Our proposal consists in combining the identification results of two different approaches, based on line and textural features. The steps of the ensemble architecture are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed for removing the staff lines. Then, music lines and texture images are generated for computing line features and textural features. Finally, the classification results are combined for identifying the writer. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, achieving a recognition rate of about 92% with 20 writers.     

Binarization, character extraction, and writer identification of historical Hebrew calligraphy documents

We present our work on the paleographic analysis and recognition system intended for processing of historical Hebrew calligraphy documents. The main goal is to analyze documents of different writing styles in order to identify the locations, dates, and writers of test documents. Using interactive software tools, a data base of extracted characters has been established. It now contains about 20,000 characters of 34 different writers, and will be distinctly expanded in the near future. Preliminary results of automatic extraction of pre-specified letters using the erosion operator are presented. We further propose and test topological features for handwriting style classification based on a selected subset of the Hebrew alphabet. A writer identification experiment using 34 writers yielded 100% correct classification.     

Navigational behaviors in hypermedia documents in music

Abstract

Hypermedia is defined as an interactive multimedia application where discrete information units of various formats can be accessed in nonlinear ways. This kind of application does differ from traditional information delivery systems in allowing the user considerable freedom in making navigational decisions; users are able to determine, at least to some extent, the media-form of presentation and the order of material presented. However given this freedom, it is possible in some situations that learners might stray from the teacher's instructional objective and become overly engaged in unrelated browsing activities. This study investigates navigational behaviors made by college undergraduate music appreciation students who used a hypermedia program as a supplement to traditional instruction. Results indicated that students accessed these materials in strikingly different ways. While some users read the screens in linear fashion not viewing any multimedia nodes, others made many nonlinear jumps and investigated multimedia nodes often. Although most students did access the musical nodes, most did not listen to the musical examples in their entirety. Overall lesson length varied considerably. Results also indicated that students acted in dynamic fashions, making many navigational actions that were not related to the established instructional objective.     

Individuality of alphabet knowledge in online writer identification

Allograph prototype approaches for writer identification have been gaining popularity recently due to its simplicity and promising identification rates. Character prototypes that are used as allographs produce a consistent set of templates that models the handwriting styles of writers, thereby allowing high accuracies to be attained. We hypothesize that the alphabet knowledge inherent in such character prototypes can provide additional writer information pertaining to their styles of writing and their identities. This paper utilizes a character prototype approach to establish evidence that knowledge of the alphabet offers additional clues which help in the writer identification process. This paper then introduces an alphabet information coefficient (AIC) to better exploit such alphabet knowledge for writer identification. Our experiments showed an increase in writer identification accuracy from 66.0 to 87.0% on a database of 200 reference writers when alphabet knowledge was used. Experiments related to the reduction in dimensionality of the writer identification system are also reported. Our results show that the discriminative power of the alphabet can be used to reduce the complexity while maintaining the same level of performance for the writer identification system.     

乐谱图像乐符分割技术*

提出基于图段拓扑关系的谱线删除方法,以避免谱线过删除现象;提出双向游程编码结合使用的符干分割方法,克服了现有方法对复杂音符适应性差、分割结果不完整等缺陷;提出音符先验知识引导下的符头切割与检测算法,以解决粘连符头的切分问题;提出基于块状体分割和特征检测的符梁分割算法,设计了适用于乐谱版面的文字和线条提取算法。该方法应用在乐谱识别系统中分割乐符具有良好的性能,尤其对乐谱内容复杂、乐符排列密集等情况有较强适应能力。     

基于复小波的脱线手写体笔迹鉴别

进行脱线笔迹鉴别时,笔迹特征只能从手写体图像中提取,且无法获取书写时的动态信息,导致了脱线笔迹鉴别的正确率不是很高。为了进一步提高脱线手写体笔迹鉴别的正确率,提出基于复小波的GGD模型方法对笔迹进行鉴别。与传统小波GGD模型方法比较,复小波GGD模型方法具有时移不变性和良好的方向分析能力,在提取纹理特征方面更有效。实验结果表明,该方法在鉴别正确率上有很大的提升。     

Novel geometric features for off-line writer identification

Writer identification is an important field in forensic document examination. Typically, a writer identification system consists of two main steps: feature extraction and matching and the performance depends significantly on the feature extraction step. In this paper, we propose a set of novel geometrical features that are able to characterize different writers. These features include direction, curvature, and tortuosity. We also propose an improvement of the edge-based directional and chain code-based features. The proposed methods are applicable to Arabic and English handwriting. We have also studied several methods for computing the distance between feature vectors when comparing two writers. Evaluation of the methods is performed using both the IAM handwriting database and the QUWI database for each individual feature reaching Top1 identification rates of 82 and 87 % in those two datasets, respectively. The accuracies achieved by Kernel Discriminant Analysis (KDA) are significantly higher than those observed before feature-level writer identification was implemented. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the improved versions of both chain-code features and edge-based directional features.     

A writer identification system for on-line whiteboard data

In this paper we address the task of writer identification of on-line handwriting captured from a whiteboard. Different sets of features are extracted from the recorded data and used to train a text and language independent on-line writer identification system. The system is based on Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) which provide a powerful yet simple means of representing the distribution of the features extracted from the handwritten text. The training data of all writers are used to train a universal background model (UBM) from which a client specific model is obtained by adaptation. Different sets of features are described and evaluated in this work. The system is tested using text from 200 different writers. A writer identification rate of 98.56% on the paragraph and of 88.96% on the text line level is achieved.     

离线手写体笔迹鉴别方法研究

笔迹鉴别可分为在线、离线两种。主要针对现有的离线手写体笔迹鉴别方法展开研究,重点集中在笔迹图像预处理、特征提取、分类、鉴别过程和效果评价等方面,探讨了各种方法的优点和不足,并提出了今后一些可能的研究方向和内容。     

抗混叠轮廓波变换的脱线中文手写体笔迹识别

为了进一步提高脱线中文手写体笔迹识别的正确率,提出了一种基于抗混叠轮廓波变换的特征提取算法。抗混叠轮廓波变换不仅具有轮廓波变换的多尺度、多方向特性,同时克服了轮廓波变换中频谱混叠的现象,避免了重构图像出现“划痕”现象。实验结果证明,抗混叠轮廓波变换的GGD模型与使用单小波、复小波、轮廓波变换的GGD模型方法比较,识别正确率分别提高了23.5%、7.7%、2.5%。     

Language identification in web documents using discrete HMMs

This paper deals with language identification in the domain of web documents. The proposed system is built on hidden Markov models (HMMs) that enable the modeling of character sequences. Furthermore, the use of HMMs provides the means for language tracking, that is, language identification across the segments of a multilingual document.     

An effective DeepWINet CNN model for off-line text-independent writer identification

Pattern Analysis and Applications - Writer identification based on handwriting recognition is considered one of the most common research areas in pattern recognition and biometrics. It has...     

Text-independent writer identification and verification using textural and allographic features

The identification of a person on the basis of scanned images of handwriting is a useful biometric modality with application in forensic and historic document analysis and constitutes an exemplary study area within the research field of behavioral biometrics. We developed new and very effective techniques for automatic writer identification and verification that use probability distribution functions (PDFs) extracted from the handwriting images to characterize writer individuality. A defining property of our methods is that they are designed to be independent of the textual content of the handwritten samples. Our methods operate at two levels of analysis: the texture level and the character-shape (allograph) level. At the texture level, we use contour-based joint directional PDFs that encode orientation and curvature information to give an intimate characterization of individual handwriting style. In our analysis at the allograph level, the writer is considered to be characterized by a stochastic pattern generator of ink-trace fragments, or graphemes. The PDF of these simple shapes in a given handwriting sample is characteristic for the writer and is computed using a common shape codebook obtained by grapheme clustering. Combining multiple features (directional, grapheme, and run-length PDFs) yields increased writer identification and verification performance. The proposed methods are applicable to free-style handwriting (both cursive and isolated) and have practical feasibility, under the assumption that a few text lines of handwritten material are available in order to obtain reliable probability estimates     

Mathematical formula identification and performance evaluation in PDF documents

An important initial step of mathematical formula recognition is to correctly identify the location of formulae within documents. Previous work in this area has traditionally focused on image-based documents; however, given the prevalence and popularity of the PDF format for dissemination, alternatives to image-based approaches are increasingly being explored. In this paper, we investigate the use of both machine learning techniques and heuristic rules to locate the boundaries of both isolated and embedded formulae within documents, based upon data extracted directly from PDF files. We propose four new features along with preprocessing and post-processing techniques for isolated formula identification. Furthermore, we compare, analyse and extensively tune nine state-of-the-art learning algorithms for a comprehensive evaluation of our proposed methods. The evaluation is carried out over a ground-truth dataset, which we have made publicly available, together with an application adaptable fine-grained evaluation metric. Our experimental results demonstrate that the overall accuracies of isolated and embedded formula identification are increased by 11.52 and 10.65 %, compared with our previously proposed formula identification approach.