---
title: IAM Dataset Writer Recognition Using a CNN
description: Identifying handwriting authors using a CNN-based approach on the IAM dataset.
pubDate: 2018-11-09T00:00:00.000Z
tags: machine-learning
---

During the past few days I have been studying how to identify the
author of a text based on their writing styles. Fortunately, I found
the
[“handwriting_recognition”](https://github.com/priya-dwivedi/Deep-Learning/tree/master/handwriting_recognition)
Jupyter notebook by [“Priyanka Dwivedi”](https://github.com/priya-dwivedi),
which uses the method explained in the paper [“DeepWriter: A
Multi-Stream Deep CNN for Text-independent Writer
Identification”](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06472) to solve this
problem.

I had some issues while trying to understand the notebook, as it
lacks specific instructions on how to setup the dataset and how
exactly the data parsing is done. As a result, I decided to rewrite
the notebook step-by-step to improve my own understanding of the
method, and hopefully help others who wish to do the same.

The code and instructions on how to set it up can be found in the
[“iam_writer_recognition”](https://github.com/diegocasmo/iam_writer_recognition)
repository. I have tried to explain each step during the process
as clearly as possible, as well as to provide visual examples of
what the code is doing at each step. Let me know if you have any
questions or suggestions on how to improve it.