New Mathematical and Algorithmic Schemes for Pattern Classification with Application to the Identification of Writers of Important Ancient Documents

TL;DR

This paper presents new mathematical and algorithmic methods for classifying curves based on similarity, with applications in identifying writers of ancient documents, achieving accurate attribution and dating.

Contribution

Introduces a novel curve similarity measure using plane curvature and applies it to classify ancient handwritten documents by their authors.

Findings

Effective curve classification demonstrated on reference datasets.

Successful attribution of ancient inscriptions to individual writers.

Accurate dating of Byzantine codices achieved.

Abstract

In this paper, a novel approach is introduced for classifying curves into proper families, according to their similarity. First, a mathematical quantity we call plane curvature is introduced and a number of propositions are stated and proved. Proper similarity measures of two curves are introduced and a subsequent statistical analysis is applied. First, the efficiency of the curve fitting process has been tested on 2 shapes datasets of reference. Next, the methodology has been applied to the very important problem of classifying 23 Byzantine codices and 46 Ancient inscriptions to their writers, thus achieving correct dating of their content. The inscriptions have been attributed to ten individual hands and the Byzantine codices to four writers.