Identification of Tamil handwritten calligraphies at different levels such as character, word and paragraph is complicated when compared to other western language scripts. None of the existing methods provides efficient Tamil handwriting writer identification (THWI). Also offline Tamil handwritten identification at different levels still offers many motivating challenges to researchers. This paper employs a deep learning algorithm for handwriting image classification. Deep learning has its own dimensions to generate new features from a limited set of training dataset. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is one of deep, feed-forward artificial neural network is applied to THWI. The dataset collection and classification phase of CNN enables data access and automatic feature generation. Since the number of parameters is significantly reduced, training time to THWI is proportionally reduced. Understandably, the CNNs produced much higher identification rate compared with traditional ANN at different levels of handwriting.

Tamil writer identification is the task of identifying writer based on their Tamil handwriting. Our earlier work of this research based on SVM implementation with linear, polynomial and RBF kernel showed that linear kernel attains very low accuracy compared to other two kernels. But the observation shows that linear kernel performs faster than the other kernels and also it shows very less computational complexity. Hence, a modified linear kernel is proposed to enrich the performance of the linear kernel in recognizing the Tamil writer. Weighted least square parameter estimation method is used to estimate the weights for the dot products of the linear kernel. SVM implementation with modified linear kernel is carried out on different text images of handwriting at character, word and paragraph levels. Comparing the performance with linear kernel, the modified kernel with weighted least square parameter reported promising results.