Measuring layout features in mediaeval documents for writer identification

Palaeography is the study of ancient handwriting, aiming not only at deciphering, reading, and dating historical manuscripts, but also at reconstructing and interpreting the history of writing techniques and styles from the Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. Palaeographers are therefore engaged in discovering when a manuscript was written, where it was written and how the writing was technically executed; they are also interested in characterizing features and habits of individual scribes and in distinguishing them from one another. We present a pattern recognition system which tries to solve a typical palaeographic problem: to distinguish the different scribes who have worked together to the transcription of a single medieval book. In the specific case of a high standardized book typology (the so called Latin "Giant Bibles"), we wished to verify if the extraction of certain specifically devised features, concerning the layout of the page, allowed to obtain satisfactory results. The experiments, performed on a large dataset of digital images from the so called "Avila Bible" (a giant Latin copy of the whole Bible produced during the XII century between Italy and Spain) confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method. © (2017) by the International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO). All rights reserved.