short-paper

Writer Characterization and Identification of Short Modern and Historical Documents: Reconsidering Paleographic Tables

Authors:

Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin,

Israel FinkelsteinAuthors Info & Claims

DocEng '19: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2019

Article No.: 23, Pages 1 - 4

https://doi.org/10.1145/3342558.3345413

Published: 23 September 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Handwriting is considered a unique "fingerprint" that characterizes a scribe (it is even used as evidence in modern forensics). In paleography (the study of ancient writing), it is presumed that each writer has a one prototype for each letter in the alphabet. Commonly, for ancient inscriptions, letters are organized into paleographic tables (where the rows are the alphabet letters, and the columns represent the examined inscriptions). These tables play a significant role in dating inscriptions based on their resemblance to columns in the table. In this paper, we argue that each scribe "fingerprint" is not represented by a single character prototype, but in fact by a distribution of characters. We introduce a framework for automatically identifying the writer style and constructing paleographic tables based on character histograms. Subsequently, we propose a method for comparing short documents utilizing letter distribution. We demonstrate the validity of the methods on two handwritten datasets: Modern and Ancient Hebrew pertaining to the First Temple period. Our methodology on the ancient dataset enables us to provide additional evidence concerning the level of literacy in the kingdom of Judah ca. 600 BCE.

Supplementary Material

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References

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U. Sharma, and V. Rana. 2017. Handwriting Comparison in Court Trials: a Need for Forensic Upgradation. International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science, 8.

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L. Wolf, N. Dershowitz, L. Potikha, T. German, R. Shweka, and Y. Choueka. 2011. Automatic Palaeographic Exploration of Genizah Manuscripts, 3, Books on Demand.

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S. Faigenbaum-Golovin, A. Shaus, B. Sober, D. Levin, N. Na'aman, B. Sass, E. Turkel, E. Piasetzky, and I. Finkelstein. 2016. Algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judah's military correspondence sheds light on composition of biblical texts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, 4664--4669.

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A. Shaus, and E. Turkel. 2017. Writer Identification in Modern and Historical Documents via Binary Pixel Patterns, Kolmogorov--Smirnov Test and Fisher's Method. Electronic Imaging, 2017, 203--211.

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Digital Library

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Modern Hebrew Dataset. (Online): www-nuclear.tau.ac.il/eip/ostraca/DataSets/Modern_Hebrew.zip. Last accessed: 27/5/2019.

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Supplemental Material. (Online): https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b9b8a4_cd710d52d3a942d49f0c108b5d126e32.pdf. Last accessed: 27/5/2019.

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S. Faigenbaum, A. Shaus, B. Sober, E. Turkel, and E. Piasetzky, "Evaluating glyph binarizations based on their properties," in Proceedings of the 2013 ACM symposium on Document engineering, 2013.

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Ancient Hebrew Dataset. (Online): www-nuclear.tau.ac.il/eip/ostraca/DataSets/Arad_Ancient_Hebrew.zip. Last accessed:27/5/2019.

Cited By

Faigenbaum-Golovin SShaus ASober B(2022)Computational Handwriting Analysis of Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions – A SurveyIEEE BITS the Information Theory Magazine10.1109/MBITS.2022.3197559(1-15)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/MBITS.2022.3197559
Faigenbaum-Golovin SShaus ASober BGerber YTurkel EPiasetzky EFinkelstein I(2021)Literacy in Judah and IsraelNear Eastern Archaeology10.1086/71407084:2(148-158)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.1086/714070
Faigenbaum-Golovin SShaus ASober BTurkel EPiasetzky EFinkelstein I(2020)Algorithmic handwriting analysis of the Samaria inscriptions illuminates bureaucratic apparatus in biblical IsraelPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.022745215:1(e0227452)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2020
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227452

Index Terms

Writer Characterization and Identification of Short Modern and Historical Documents: Reconsidering Paleographic Tables
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Computer vision
      1. Computer vision problems
        Object identification
        Shape inference

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cover image ACM Conferences

DocEng '19: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2019

September 2019

254 pages

ISBN:9781450368872

DOI:10.1145/3342558

General Chairs:
Uwe Borghoff,
Sonja Schimmler

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

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Published: 23 September 2019

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DocEng '19: ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2019

September 23 - 26, 2019

Berlin, Germany

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Overall Acceptance Rate 194 of 564 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

Faigenbaum-Golovin SShaus ASober B(2022)Computational Handwriting Analysis of Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions – A SurveyIEEE BITS the Information Theory Magazine10.1109/MBITS.2022.3197559(1-15)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/MBITS.2022.3197559
Faigenbaum-Golovin SShaus ASober BGerber YTurkel EPiasetzky EFinkelstein I(2021)Literacy in Judah and IsraelNear Eastern Archaeology10.1086/71407084:2(148-158)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.1086/714070
Faigenbaum-Golovin SShaus ASober BTurkel EPiasetzky EFinkelstein I(2020)Algorithmic handwriting analysis of the Samaria inscriptions illuminates bureaucratic apparatus in biblical IsraelPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.022745215:1(e0227452)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2020
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227452

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