Style comparisons in calligraphy

Calligraphic style is considered, for this research, visual attributes of images of calligraphic characters sampled randomly from a “work” created by a single artist. It is independent of page layout or textual content. An experimental design is developed to investigate to what extent the source of a single, or of a few pairs, of character images can be assigned to the either same work or to two different works. The experiments are conducted on the 13,571 segmented and labeled 600-dpi character images of the CADAL database. The classifier is not trained on the works tested, only on other works. Even when only a few samples of same-class pairs are available, the difference-vector of a few simple features extracted from each image of a pair yields over 80% classification accuracy for a same-work vs. different-work dichotomy. When many pairs of different classes are available for each pair, the accuracy, using the same features, is almost the same. These style-verification experiments are part of our larger goal of style identification and forgery detection.