CUE: Compound Uniform Encoding for Writer Retrieval

Writer retrieval is crucial in document forensics and historical document analysis. However, due to the difference in syntactic structure between Chinese and other languages, the existing methods may not be directly applied to Chinese writer retrieval. Previous work on Chinese writer retrieval does not overcome the performance degradation problem when the number of samples grows. In this paper, we propose a novel compound uniform encoding algorithm (CUE) for Chinese writer retrieval, which mainly consists of a combined feature extraction module (CFE) and a prototype substitution module (PS). The CFE module combines two complementary features from image filter response and character contour. It counts local symmetries and edge co-occurrence pairs. PS module substitutes the outliers with the class prototypes to alleviate the influence of the outliers. Finally, the weighted Chi-square distance is applied to measure the similarity between writer and text. To verify the superiority of our proposed method, experiments are conducted on four public datasets and our built dataset. The results validate that CUE outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms on mAP metric.