Writer verification based on a single handwriting word samples

The writer recognition task has received a lot of interests during the last decade due to it wide range of applications. This task includes writer identification and/or writer verification. However, all the researches assumed that they dispose of a large amount of text to identify or authenticate the writer, which is never the case in real-life applications. In this paper, we present an original approach for the writer authentication task based on the analysis of a unique sample of a handwriting word. We used the Levenshtein edit distance based on Fisher-Wagner algorithm to estimate the cost of transforming one handwritten word into another. Such method has been successfully applied for signature authentication and voice recognition. In order to apply it to handwriting words, we developed a segmentation module to generate the graphemes; considered as elementary components for each word. We evaluated this approach on part of the IAM database (100 writers), where half of them provided three samples only of the same word. The obtained results are very promising since we succeed to accept correctly in 87 % of cases when we used the whole database (100 writers) and up to 92 % when we used 40 writers.