Hyperspectral Image Analysis for Writer Identification using Deep Learning

Handwriting is a behavioral characteristic of human beings that is one of the common idiosyncrasies utilized for litigation purposes. Writer identification is commonly used for forensic examination of questioned and specimen documents. Recent advancements in imaging and machine learning technologies have empowered the development of automated, intelligent and robust writer identification methods. Most of the existing methods based on human defined features and color imaging have limited performance in terms of accuracy and robustness. However, rich spectral information content obtained from hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and suitable spatio-spectral features extracted using deep learning can significantly enhance the performance of writer identification in terms of accuracy and robustness. In this paper, we propose a novel writer identification method in which spectral responses of text pixels in a hyperspectral document image are extracted and are fed to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for writer classification. Different CNN architectures, hyperparameters, spatio-spectral formats, train-test ratios and inks are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed system on the UWA Writing Inks Hyperspectral Images (WIHSI) database and to select the most suitable set of parameters for writer identification. The findings of this work have opened a new arena in forensic document analysis for writer identification using HSI and deep learning.