Multi-script Writer Identification using Dissimilarity

Multi-script writer identification consists in identifying a person of a given text written in one script from the samples of the same person written in another script. The rationale behind this is that the writing style of an individual remains constant across different scripts. While this hypothesis may hold, recent results on a multi-script writer identification competition show that classical writer-dependent classifiers fail in this task. In this work we investigate the efficacy of a writer-independent classifier based on dissimilarity for multi-script writer identification. The classifiers were trained using two different texture descriptors (LBP and LPQ). Our experiments on 475 writers of the QUWI dataset, which is composed of Arabic and English samples, show that the proposed strategy surpasses the results published in the literature by a large margin, achieving error rates similar to single-script writer identification systems.