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On writer identification for Arabic historical manuscripts

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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.

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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.

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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

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  1. Abedelkadir Asi
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  2. Alaa Abdalhaleem
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  3. Daniel Fecker
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  5. Jihad El-Sana
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Correspondence to Alaa Abdalhaleem.

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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

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