A Polar Stroke Descriptor for classification of historical documents

This paper presents a method for extracting a local scale- and rotation-invariant descriptor called Polar Stroke Descriptor (PSD) from the strokes in handwritten documents. Our descriptor captures the stroke-length distribution on a reference point and results in a robust feature vector. Furthermore, we develop a compact stroke representation termed as strokelets inspired by the classical Bag of Words model. We apply the proposed representation to historical document dating and the experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MPS database.