Handwriting-based writer identification, a branch of biometrics, is an active research topic in pattern recognition. Since most existing methods and models aim to on-line and/or text-dependent writer identification, it is necessary to propose new methods for off-line, text-independent writer identification. At present, two-dimensional Gabor model is widely acknowledged as an effective and classic method for off-line, text-independent handwriting identification, while it still suffers from some inherent shortcomings, such as the excessive calculational cost. In this paper, we present a novel method based on hidden Markov tree (HMT) model in wavelet domain for off-line, text-independent writer identification of Chinese handwriting documents. Our experiments show this HMT method, compared with two-dimensional Gabor model, not only achieves better identification results but also greatly reduces the elapsed time on computation. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.