Writer identification through information retrieval: the allograph weight vector
Ralph Niels, F.A. Grootjen, L.G. Vuurpijl · 2008
We show a number of promising results in writer identification, by recasting the traditional information re-trieval (IR) problem of finding documents based on the frequency of occurrence of their terms. In IR, the tf-idf is a well-known statistical measure that weighs the im-portance of certain terms occurring in a database of doc-uments. Here, writers are searched on the basis of the frequency of occurrence of particular character shapes: the allographs. The results show a high retrieval score. Moreover, by using the af-iwf (allograph frequency- in-verse writer frequency) measure, qualitative and quantita-tive analyses can be made that elaborate on the particular allograph shapes that lead to a successful writer identifi-cation. In this paper, we sketch the application of these techniques in forensic science.