Character-based Writer Verification of Ancient Hebrew Square-script Manuscripts: On Edge-direction Feature

Abstract

Handwriting significantly contributes to the task of the writer identification and verification of modern and historical documents. This work developed a writer verification system for ancient Hebrew square-script manuscripts, mainly based on the edge-direction feature. Two configurations within the proposed system are carried out, i.e., character-based edge-direction feature extraction and extraction techniques of handwriting shape representation that may drive the system performance. A classification-based verification approach, utilizing Support Vector Machine (SVM) as the classifier, is employed to evaluate the performance of the two configurations. This study has confirmed that the skeleton-based shape representation technique outperforms the edge detection technique used in the predecessor approach. Furthermore, a character-based writer verification system provides the corresponding scholars and experts with an alphabetical investigation to identify the uniqueness of each writer’s handwriting.