Semi-Supervised Feature Learning for Off-Line Writer Identifications

Conventional approaches used supervised learning to estimate off-line writer identifications. In this study, we improved the off-line writer identifica- tions by semi-supervised feature learning pipeline, which trained the extra unla- beled data and the original labeled data simultaneously. In specific, we proposed a weighted label smoothing regularization (WLSR) method, which assigned the weighted uniform label distribution to the extra unlabeled data. We regularized the convolutional neural network (CNN) baseline, which allows learning more discriminative features to represent the properties of different writing styles. Based on experiments on ICDAR2013, CVL and IAM benchmark datasets, our results showed that semi-supervised feature learning improved the baseline meas- urement and achieved better performance compared with existing writer identifications approaches.