A Survey on Writer Identification System for Indic Scripts

Abstract

Handwriting is a skill, expression of someone’s personality that cannot be imitated. It is a physical way of communicating thoughts and ideas and a method for speaking with others. Handwriting is considered as the behavioural characteristic of a person. It is concerned with the sentiments, attitude and brain of a person. Thus no two persons can have the same handwriting. Indeed, even indistinguishable twins who share appearance and hereditary qualities do not have the same handwriting. Handwriting based writer identification has attracted a great deal of attention by researchers to prove someone’s authenticity. It is the process of identifying a person through his/her handwriting. This paper introduces a survey on the work accomplished for writer identification for Indic scripts. The work done on Indic scripts is confined as compared to the non-Indic scripts due to non-availability of the dataset. The anatomy of the paper comprises introduction, stages of writer identification system, applications, reported work and conclusion. The primary focus of this paper is to present the review on writer identification system for Indic scripts, mainly, Devanagari, Gurumukhi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Kannada, Gujarati, Oriya, and Malayalam. This study provides guidance to the research analysts in this area by giving the studies of work done on Indic scripts.