Online Kanji Characters Based Writer Identification Using Sequential Forward Floating Selection and Support Vector Machine

Writer identification has become a hot research topic in the fields of pattern recognition, forensic document analysis, the criminal justice system, etc. The goal of this research is to propose an efficient approach for writer identification based on online handwritten Kanji characters. We collected 47,520 samples from 33 people who wrote 72 online handwritten-based Kanji characters 20 times. We extracted features from the handwriting data and proposed a support vector machine (SVM)-based classifier for writer identification. We also conducted experiments to see how the accuracy changes with feature selection and parameter tuning. Both text-dependent and text-independent writer identification were studied in this work. In the case of text-dependent writer identification, we obtained the accuracy of each Kanji character separately. We then studied the text-independent case by considering some of the top discriminative characters from the text-dependent case. Finally, another text-dependent experiment was performed by taking two, three, and four Kanji characters instead of using only one character. The experimental results illustrated that SVM provided the highest identification accuracy of 99.0% for the text-independent case and 99.6% for text-dependent writer identification. We hope that this study will be helpful for writer identification using online handwritten Kanji characters.