Similarity-based image retrieval for revealing forgery of handwritten corpora

Authorship attribution is a problem with a long history and a wide range of applications. Recent works in non-traditional authorship attribution contexts demonstrate the practicality of automatic analysis of documents based on authorial style. However, such analyses are difficult to apply and few “best practices” are available. In this paper, we show how quantitative techniques based on image similarity search can be profitably exploited for revealing forgery of handwritten corpora. More in details, we explore the case where a document is represented by means of the image of the document itself. Preliminary experimental results conducted on real data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.