Writer identification problem is one of the important area of research due to its various applications and is a challenging task. The major research on writer identification is based on handwritten English documents with text independent and dependent. However, there is no significant work on identification of writers based on Kannada document. Hence, in this paper, we propose a text-independent method for off-line writer identification based on Kannada handwritten scripts. By observing each individual’s handwriting as a different texture image, a set of features based on Discrete Cosine Transform, Gabor filtering and gray level co-occurrence matrix, are extracted from preprocessed document image blocks. Experimental results demonstrate that the Gabor energy features are more potential than the DCTs and GLCMs based features for writer identification from 20 people.