New Mathematical and Algorithmic Schemes for Pattern Classification with Application to the Identification of Writers of Important Ancient Documents
It addresses the specific problem of dating and attributing ancient documents for historians and archaeologists, though it appears incremental in its methodological contributions.
The paper tackles the problem of classifying curves into families based on similarity, introducing a novel approach with plane curvature and similarity measures, and applies it to identify writers of 23 Byzantine codices and 46 ancient inscriptions, achieving attribution to four and ten writers respectively.
In this paper, a novel approach is introduced for classifying curves into proper families, according to their similarity. First, a mathematical quantity we call plane curvature is introduced and a number of propositions are stated and proved. Proper similarity measures of two curves are introduced and a subsequent statistical analysis is applied. First, the efficiency of the curve fitting process has been tested on 2 shapes datasets of reference. Next, the methodology has been applied to the very important problem of classifying 23 Byzantine codices and 46 Ancient inscriptions to their writers, thus achieving correct dating of their content. The inscriptions have been attributed to ten individual hands and the Byzantine codices to four writers.