A new approach for the identification of writers of important ancient documents

In this paper, a novel approach is introduced for identifying the writer of a document, with special emphasis to paleography. Towards this direction, a mathematical quantity called plane curvature is introduced and a number of associated propositions are stated. Proper similarity measures of two curves are defined and a subsequent statistical analysis is applied. The efficiency of the method has been, first, tested on a public reference database. The methodology has also been applied to the very important problem of classifying 23 Byzantine codices and 46 Ancient inscriptions to their writers, thus achieving correct dating of their content. The inscriptions have been attributed to ten individual hands and the Byzantine codices to four writers. Prominent epigraphologists and classicists fully agree with the obtained classification.