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Abstract
This study tests the effectiveness of Multi-Script Handwriting Identification after simplifying character strokes, by segmenting them into sub-parts. Character simplification is performed through splitting the character by branching-points and end-points, a process called stroke fragmentation in this study. The resulting sub-parts of the character are called stroke fragments and are evaluated individually to identify the writer. This process shares similarities with the concept of stroke decomposition in Optical Character Recognition which attempts to recognize characters through the writing strokes that make them up. The main idea of this study is that the characters of different writing‑scripts (English, Chinese, etc.) may have common shapes which can be extracted and used in the handwriting identification process. The effectiveness of the stroke fragmentation described in this study is tested on the Chinese-English Database from the University of Groningen. While not achieving state of the art performance, the results of this study imply that simplifying characters shows promise in use for handwriting identification.
