Note on CASIA Handwriting Database

1. Introduction

Writer identification has been an active research topic in recent years. The Institute of Automation , Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA) will provide the CASIA online Database freely of charge to writer identification researchers in order to promote research. In the CASIA online handwriting Database there are three datasets: Dataset 1 (Chinese database) , Dataset 2 (English database) and Dataset 3 (Chinese and English database).

2. Brief Descriptions of the Database

The CASIA online handwriting database, which contains more than 1500 handwritten texts in online format from 250 writers in two sessions.

Each writer writes eight pages of texts include four pages of Chinese texts and four pages of English texts respectively. In the first session, each writer has written same sentence of about 50 Chinese and English words in one page respectively and different Chinese and English sentence chosen by writers freely about 50 words in two pages respectively. In the second session, each writer has written different Chinese and English sentence about 50 words in one page respectively. We define three dataset in our database.

Dataset 1 (Chinese database) was created on Sept.20, 2007, including 242 persons in first session and second session on Dec.24, 2007. Handwriting data is collected by Wacom Intuos2 tablet. Each writer has written same sentence of about 50 Chinese words in one page respectively and different Chinese sentence chosen by writers freely about 50 words in two pages. Each handwritten text is stored in a separate text file. The naming convention of the files is the writer name. In each writer file, the signature is represented as a sequence of points. The first line stores a single integer which is the total number of points in the writer. Each of the following lines corresponds to one point characterized by features listed in the following order: x-coordinate, y-coordinate, time stamp, button status, azimuth, altitude, and pressure.

(a) Device for Data Collection: wancom Intuos2

(b) samples of online handwriting in Chinese

Dataset 2 (English database) was created on Sept.20, 2007, including 149 persons in first session and second session on Dec.24, 2007. Handwriting data is collected by Wacom Intuos2 tablet. Each writer has written same sentence of about 50 English words in one page respectively and different English sentence chosen by writers freely about 50 words in two pages. Each handwritten text is stored in a separate text file. The naming convention of the files is the writer name. In each writer file, the signature is represented as a sequence of points. The first line stores a single integer which is the total number of points in the writer. Each of the following lines corresponds to one point characterized by features listed in the following order: x-coordinate, y-coordinate, time stamp, button status, azimuth, altitude, and pressure.

(c) samples of online handwriting in English

Dataset 3 ( Chinese and English database ) was created on Sept.20, 2007, including 149 persons in first session and second session on Dec.24, 2007. We merged Dataset 1 and Dataset 2 to obtain Dataset 3 ( Chinese and English database)

3. Download Instructions

Researchers requesting this database should follow the steps as below:
lVisit the website: http://biometrics.idealtest.org.
lRegister an account and login.
lDownload the CASIA Handwriting Database from our website with the authorized account:
Download the CASIA Handwriting Database here.

4. Copyright Note and Contacts

The database is released for research and educational purposes. We hold no liability for any undesirable consequences of using the database. All rights of the CASIA online handwriting database are reserved. Any person or organization is not permitted to distribute, publish, copy, or disseminate this database. In all documents and papers that report experimental results based on this database, our efforts in constructing the database should be acknowledged such as “Portions of the research in this paper use the CASIA Handwriting Database collected by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Automation (CASIA)” and a reference to “CASIA Handwriting Database, http://biometrics.idealtest.org/” should be included.