Modeling Handwriting Style: A Preliminary Investigation

We present a study for modeling handwriting styles that derives from handwriting generation studies, according to which handwriting is a temporal sequence of elementary movements. Hence, handwriting style results from the way those movements are actually performed and sequentially executed to reach fluency. We conjecture that handwriting styles depend on two main factors: the shape of the traces corresponding to the elementary movements and the way these traces are connected. To prove this conjecture, and the handwriting style model we have derived from it, we have designed an experiment in which handwriting samples are described by only two parameters and then clustered. The experimental results show that, despite its simplicity, the proposed method is able to capture the distinctive aspects of handwriting styles behind the handwriting samples, even when the writers deliberately attempts to modify it, and therefore corroborate our conjecture.