English

Re-ranking for Writer Identification and Writer Retrieval

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2020-07-15 v1

Abstract

Automatic writer identification is a common problem in document analysis. State-of-the-art methods typically focus on the feature extraction step with traditional or deep-learning-based techniques. In retrieval problems, re-ranking is a commonly used technique to improve the results. Re-ranking refines an initial ranking result by using the knowledge contained in the ranked result, e. g., by exploiting nearest neighbor relations. To the best of our knowledge, re-ranking has not been used for writer identification/retrieval. A possible reason might be that publicly available benchmark datasets contain only few samples per writer which makes a re-ranking less promising. We show that a re-ranking step based on k-reciprocal nearest neighbor relationships is advantageous for writer identification, even if only a few samples per writer are available. We use these reciprocal relationships in two ways: encode them into new vectors, as originally proposed, or integrate them in terms of query-expansion. We show that both techniques outperform the baseline results in terms of mAP on three writer identification datasets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.07101,
  title  = {Re-ranking for Writer Identification and Writer Retrieval},
  author = {Simon Jordan and Mathias Seuret and Pavel Král and Ladislav Lenc and Jiří Martínek and Barbara Wiermann and Tobias Schwinger and Andreas Maier and Vincent Christlein},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.07101},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T17:06:47.902Z