Writer Identification from Handwritten Devanagari Script

This paper presents analysis of Devanagari characters for writer identification. Being originated from Brahmic script, Devanagari is the most popular script in India. It is used by over 400 million people around the world. Application of writer identification of Devanagari handwritten characters covers a vast area such as The Questioned Document Examination (QDE) is an area of the Forensic Science with the main purpose to answer questions related to questioned document (authenticity, authorship and others). Signature verification in banking, in Graphology (study of handwriting) a theory or practice for inferring a person's character, disposition, and attitudes from their handwriting. Here we collect 5 copies of handwritten characters to nullify intra-writing variation, from 50 different people mainly students. After preprocessing and character extraction, 64-dimensional feature is computed based on gradient of the images. Some manual processing is required because some noises are too difficult to remove automatically as they are much closer to the characters. We have used LIBLINEAR and LIBSVM classifiers of WEKA environment to get the individuality of characters. We have done the writer identification with all the characters and obtained 99.12 % accuracy for LIBLINEAR with all writers. Features collected from this work can be used in the next level to identify writers from their cursive writing.