An Interactive Tool for Forensic Handwriting Examination

We introduce a tool for quantitative evaluation of handwriting features largely adopted during forensic examination of questioned documents. The tool is based on a model of handwriting generation and execution according to which handwriting is composed of elementary movements, called strokes, whose order and timing of execution has been learned and stored in the brain. Thus, what characterizes handwriting individuality, and therefore should be inferred from the samples available, is the way the sequence of strokes are executed. The tool does not aim at reaching a conclusion on the writer´s identity when comparing two documents, but provides the quantitative evaluation of a set of features that can be used by the expert to support his/her conclusion. Although the tool is meant to proceed automatically from the scanned image of the document to the quantitative evaluation of the features, it is equipped with an interface that allows the expert to follow the automatic procedure step-by-step and even to modify the output of any step and to modify it in case it is deemed as incorrect. The tool automatically produces a customizable report to illustrate the procedure, the features computation and to show the computed features values in both numerical and graphical form.