Online text independent writer identification using character prototypes distribution

Recently, with the advances in digital pen and paper technology, renewed attention was given on research for writer identification of online documents. This paper proposes a method to retrieve the writer of a document by comparing his handwriting with those stored in a reference database of documents. The query will consist of a testing online handwriting document, the output will be a ranked list of writers whose online handwriting documents are stored in the reference database. The proposed method is text independent and does not impose any constraint on the writing style; it is based on a distance measurement between the distributions of reference patterns defined at the character level. Experiment has been carried out on a database which consists of 82 subjects each providing two online handwritten documents, one stored as the reference and the second one is for retrieval purposes. The Top 1 rate reported is 95% accuracy.