Writer-identification in the DSS

SOME PRELIMINARY RESULTS:

A Digital Palaeographic Approach towards Writer Identification in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Topics: Feature Selection and Extraction; Image Understanding

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 1: ICPRAM, 693-702, 2017, Porto, Portugal

Authors: Maruf A. Dhali 1 ; Sheng He 1 ; Mladen Popović 1 ; Eibert Tigchelaar 2 and Lambert Schomaker 1

Affiliations: 1 University of Groningen, Netherlands ; 2 KU Leuven, Belgium

ISBN: 978-989-758-222-6

Keyword(s): Dead Sea Scrolls, Handwritten Document Analysis, Digital Palaeography, Writer Identification, Handwriting Recognition, Pattern Recognition, Feature Representation, Machine Learning.

Related Ontology Subjects/Areas/Topics: Applications ; Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics ; Feature Selection and Extraction ; Image Understanding ; Pattern Recognition ; Theory and Methods

Abstract: To understand the historical context of an ancient manuscript, scholars rely on the prior knowledge of writer and date of that document. In this paper, we study the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of ancient manuscripts with immense historical, religious, and linguistic significance, which was discovered in the mid-20th century near the Dead Sea. Most of the manuscripts of this collection have become digitally available only recently and techniques from the pattern recognition field can be applied to revise existing hypotheses on the writers and dates of these scrolls. This paper presents our ongoing work which aims to introduce digital palaeography to the field and generate fresh empirical data by means of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. Challenges in analyzing the Dead Sea Scrolls are highlighted by a pilot experiment identifying the writers using several dedicated features. Finally, we discuss whether to use specifically-designed shape features for writer identification or to use the Deep Learning methods on a relatively limited ancient manuscript collection which is degraded over the course of time and is not labeled, as in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The project was noted last year here.