Radial Line Fourier Descriptor for Handwritten Word Representation

Automatic recognition of historical handwritten manuscripts is a daunting task due to paper degradation over time. The performance of information retrieval algorithms depends heavily on feature detection and representation methods. Although there exist popular feature descriptors such as Scale Invariant Feature Transform and Speeded Up Robust Features, in order to represent handwritten words in a document, a robust descriptor is required that is not over-precise. This is because handwritten words across different documents are indeed similar, but not identical. Therefore, this paper introduces a Radial Line Fourier (RLF) descriptor for handwritten word feature representation, which is fast to construct and short-length with 32 elements only. The effectiveness of the proposed RLF descriptor is empirically evaluated using the VLFeat benchmarking framework (VLBenchmarks), and for handwritten word image representation using a historical marriage records dataset.