Text-Independent Writer Identification via CNN Features and Joint Bayesian

摘要

This paper proposes a novel method for offline text-independent writer identification by using convolutional neural network (CNN) and joint Bayesian, which consists of two stages, i.e. feature extraction and writer identification. In the stage of feature extraction, since a large number of data is essential to train an effective CNN model with high generalizability and the amount of handwriting is limited in writer identification, a data augmentation technique is first developed to generate thousands of handwriting images for each writer. Then a deep CNN network is designed to extract discriminative features to represent the properties of different writing styles, which is trained by using the generated handwriting images. In the stage of writer identification, the training dataset is used to train the CNN model for feature extraction and the joint Bayesian technique is employed to accomplish the task of writer identification based on the extracted CNN features. The proposed method is tested on two standard benchmark datasets, i.e. ICDAR2013 and CVL dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method gets the best performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.