A study of current trends writer identification in large-scale across three world major languages with retrieval approaches

Abstract

Recent developments in writer identification have led new directions, which is writer identification integrated with retrieval mechanism for boosting the performance applications of writer identification when a database is getting larger in size and retrieval of documents from expanding databases is becoming difficult. Issues on datasets used by previous studies directly impacts accuracy of the writer identification deteriorates as database size increases. Until now, in the research on writer identification researchers have been mainly interested in 'writer identification without retrieval mechanism' approach. This paper provides a review on the state of the art for writer identification with retrieval mechanism throughout three major languages, namely English, Chinese, and Arabic. Up to date, truly little attention has been paid to the role of retrieval mechanism or documents in English language identification; the growth on Arabic and Chinese is far from satisfactory in comparison to its extensive usage. A search of the literature revealed few studies for writer identification with single retrieval mechanism. Seamless integration of such strategies in current forensic handwriting experience is yet unclear. A consistently reliable and efficient, fully automated writer recognition (AWR) and a powerful handwritten document retrieval system as an emerging technology are real challenging issues might be taken by upcoming researchers. It is still considered a fresh field and still has large room for research.