# Towards Writer Retrieval for Historical Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.05358 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05358/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [Cross-Batch Memory for Embedding Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06798/) (2019)
- [Instance-level Image Retrieval using Reranking Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12236/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning for Writer Identification and Writer Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09369/) (2017)
- [Understanding Image Retrieval Re-Ranking: A Graph Neural Network Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07620/) (2020)
- [Attention-Based Query Expansion Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08019/) (2020)
- [Encoding CNN Activations for Writer Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07923/) (2017)
- [ICDAR 2019 Competition on Image Retrieval for Historical Handwritten Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03713/) (2019)
- [Writer Identification and Writer Retrieval Based on NetVLAD with Re-ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06186/) (2020)
- [Re-ranking for Writer Identification and Writer Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07101/) (2020)
- [Random VLAD based Deep Hashing for Efficient Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02333/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [SAGHOG: Self-Supervised Autoencoder for Generating HOG Features for Writer Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17221/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Vision Transformers for Writer Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00751/) (2024)
- [KaiRacters: Character-level-based Writer Retrieval for Greek Papyri](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07536/) (2024)
- [Character Detection using YOLO for Writer Identification in multiple Medieval books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04834/) (2026)
- [BullingerDB: A Dataset for Handwritten Text Recognition and Writer Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30235/) (2026)
- [Handwriting Extraction and Analysis of Signature Lists in Swiss Popular Initiatives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05018/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents an unsupervised approach for writer retrieval based on clustering SIFT descriptors detected at keypoint locations resulting in pseudo-cluster labels. With those cluster labels, a residual network followed by our proposed NetRVLAD, an encoding layer with reduced complexity compared to NetVLAD, is trained on 32x32 patches at keypoint locations. Additionally, we suggest a graph-based reranking algorithm called SGR to exploit similarities of the page embeddings to boost the retrieval performance. Our approach is evaluated on two historical datasets (Historical-WI and HisIR19). We include an evaluation of different backbones and NetRVLAD. It competes with related work on historical datasets without using explicit encodings. We set a new State-of-the-art on both datasets by applying our reranking scheme and show that our approach achieves comparable performance on a modern dataset as well.