Historical manuscript dating based on temporal pattern codebook

Manuscript dating is an essential part of historical scholarship. This paper proposes a framework for image-based historical manuscript dating based on handwritten pattern analysis in scanned historical manuscript images. We first use a singular structural feature to extract the mid-level handwritten patterns in historical document images and then encode the discovered handwritten patterns based on a codebook which contains the temporal information. We evaluate our method on the Medieval Paleographic Scale (MPS) data set and experimental results demonstrate that the feature representation based on the codebook which contains temporal information is more discriminative and powerful for dating. In addition, our proposed method can also visualize the evolution of handwritten patterns over time.