  This paper presents an end-to-end neural network system to identify writers
through handwritten word images, which jointly integrates global-context
information and a sequence of local fragment-based features. The global-context
information is extracted from the tail of the neural network by a global
average pooling step. The sequence of local and fragment-based features is
extracted from a low-level deep feature map which contains subtle information
about the handwriting style. The spatial relationship between the sequence of
fragments is modeled by the recurrent neural network (RNN) to strengthen the
discriminative ability of the local fragment features. We leverage the
complementary information between the global-context and local fragments,
resulting in the proposed global-context residual recurrent neural network
(GR-RNN) method. The proposed method is evaluated on four public data sets and
experimental results demonstrate that it can provide state-of-the-art
performance. In addition, the neural networks trained on gray-scale images
provide better results than neural networks trained on binarized and contour
images, indicating that texture information plays an important role for writer
identification.
  The source code will be available:
  \url{https://github.com/shengfly/writer-identification}.
