A Novel Approach to Writer Identification in Malayalam Using Graphemes

This paper proposes a Writer Identification scheme for Malayalam handwritten documents. The novelty of the scheme lies in the fact that the graphemes were used in the training and identification phase of the system. Graphemes are small writing fragments extracted from the handwritten documents which contain meaningful patterns and possess individuality of each writer. The scheme has been tested on a test bed of 280 writers of which 50 writers having only one page, 215 writers with at least 2 pages and 15 writers with at least 4 pages. A recognition rate of 89.28% was achieved.