Paper Info
Title
Writer Identification for Historical Manuscripts: Analysis and Optimisation of a Classifier as an Easy-to-Use Tool for Scholars from the Humanities
Abstract
Several methods have been proposed for the task of writer identification for historical manuscripts. Most of these methods have been evaluated on private historical datasets only, while few have been evaluated on the recently published historical dataset provided by the Historical-WI competition at ICDAR-2017. Nevertheless, there is no thorough analysis in the literature available w.r.t. the degradation typically found in the digitized manuscripts. Furthermore, the currently proposed methods are beyond the reach of the scholars from the humanities; either because of the impracticality of the method itself, or because of the lack of an easy-to-use implementation. In this paper, we analyse a state-of-the-art method against common degradation types in historical manuscripts using images from the virtual manuscript library of Switzerland. Furthermore, we show that, by optimising a key parameter, we can enhance the performance of the method and significantly outperform the winner method of the Historical-WI competition. Finally, we demonstrate the practicality of our implementation yielding intuitively comprehensible results for direct use of scholars from the humanities.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/ICFHR-2018.2018.00099
2018 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Historical Manuscripts,Degradation Analysis,Software Tool,Writer Identification,Pattern Recognition
Software tool,Computer science,Humanities,Classifier (linguistics)
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2167-6445
978-1-5386-5876-5
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
9
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hussein Mohammed100.68
Volker Märgner229529.02
H. Siegfried Stiehl351667.10