Handwriting analysis for writer verification

This communication deals with the writer verification task. This task consists in deciding whether two handwritten samples have been written by the same writer or not. Handwritings are first characterized by the graphemes that have been segmented by a segmentation procedure. Handwritten samples are then analysed according to two different procedures. Text samples are described in a feature space common to the two writers. The statistic of a mutual information criteria allows to build a robust hypothesis test. In the case of small samples of handwritings such as single words, the Levenstein distance is used to build a second hypothesis test. The two approaches are evaluated on a PSI database as well as the IAM database.